ObscuraCam, which is currently only built for Android, allows users to post videos online with pixilated faces to protect their identities. It can also delete potentially incriminating metadata attached to the video.
InformaCam, a plug-in to ObscuraCam. For the sake of posterity, the app allows the user to add context; for instance, whether or not the subject of the video gave their permission to be filmed. It can also provide information about the creator's intent, how the media was acquired, and "if a particular image or video is a duplicate of another."
InformaCam also allows the user to send the image or video to "trusted destinations," which could be "an organization, a news outlet, or any friend whose PGP key is known to you."
An app called Mars Images can send the newest pictures of the red planet taken by the Opportunity rover straight to your iPhone, iPad, or Android phones and tablets.
Instagram, the still iPhone-only application, is penetrating the world’s largest social network at a rate of roughly six photos per second, co-founder Kevin Systrom shared exclusively with VentureBeat. The figure means that the filter-ific application is now contributing more than half a million photos to the Facebook experience each day.
Keeping up with his reputation as the first "Internet President," Barack Obama got in on the popular photo-sharing app Instagram this week. C/Net reports.
The account is run by Obama 2012 staff members, who encourage users to share photos from the campaign trail using the hashtag #Obama2012.
So far, the account has posted three photos and gained more than 24,000 followers.
f you want to follow the president on Instagram, search for his user name, barackobama.
Instagram's popularity exploded in 2011, and Apple last month named it App of the Year.
According to Mercury News via TheNextWeb, Japan’s National Police Agency reports that 1,741 cases of illicit photography were reported in the country last year, a 1.6-fold increase on the number reported five years ago. A series of apps are being blamed for the rise.
One third of the incidents are reportedly from photo taken by smartphones, according to a police spokesperson, who suspects that the grown of silent camera apps — which remove the shutter sound that plays when a photo is taken — has given wannabe voyeurs an ideal way to grab sneaky shots.
Most cameras and mobile phones in Japan automatically make shutter sounds when they are used to take a photograph, a feature that makes it difficult for perverts to secretly capture upskirt images. Smart phone such as the iPhone usually allow users to disable all sounds, but iPhones sold in Japan have been altered to keep the shutter sound on.
However, as the Yomiuri has pointed out, some smartphone applications can disable shutter sounds.
A search for the Japanese words "muon" (silence)" and "kamera" (camera) on app sites for Apple Inc. and Google Inc. smartphones turned up about 200 applications. Some boasted they enabled users to "take photos in silence without bothering others," and others said the function "was perfect for taking photos undetected." Some of these programs have been near the top of app ranking charts.
TIME Techland on how face detection is being used offline in “smart sign” technology and other applications.
... A novel use of Intel’s face detection software has been pioneered by SceneTap, an app available for iOS and Android that lets users check out the crowds at bars and clubs before heading out. Cameras installed at local nightlife venues count everyone who enters the establishment and also detects their gender and approximate age. Looking up a bar on your smart phone will show you how packed it is, the male to female ratio, and the average age of each gender.
More advanced face detection technology also attempts to interpret a person’s emotions. Such an advance can potentially help marketers gauge reactions to their ads.
Staff in retail outlets are ringing up customers with mobile devices in larger numbers this holiday season, and are integrating in-store shopping apps to facilitate sales as brick-and-mortar retailers aim to better serve customers and streamline a sometimes combative shopping environment. Mobiledia reports.
Apps and software used in-store also enable consumers to pre-order and pre-pay for merchandise with their mobile phones, bypassing long lines and massive crowds. The merger of apps with actual browsing marries the tactility of in-store shopping with the convenience of e-commerce.
Sears, for example, has created "shopping walls" in high-traffic stores such as O'Hare Airport that feature its top-selling products. Camera-enabled phones let customers scan the Quick Response, or QR, code on products, which sends them to a shopping site to purchase the item and have it shipped to their homes.
A new smartphone app will help you transition your old paper photos into the digital age. Called ShoeBox, the free app lets you use your iPhone’s camera as a photo scanner.
The app lets users rotate, crop, date and tag photos and share them with friends and family either through Shoebox or Facebook. The photos are also stored on 1000memories.com, the website of the startup behind ShoeBox.
Belgian brand La Fille d’O wants to help us stay reasonably decent when posting our raunchier shots. The brand launched an iPhone app called ‘Obscura’ that lets you pixelate, star and black-bar all your naughty bits.
AT&T and Washington Hospital Center unveiled CodeHeart this week, a platform that allows cardiologists to view video and test results (an ECG, for example) of a patient in transit during critical care situations. The app, which was conceptualized by doctors at Washington Hospital, is available for desktops, tablets, and smartphones. MobileHealthNews reports via @mobileactive.org.
According to the company, cardiologists can use the app to assess a patient’s physical condition via video link, talk with the patient’s first responder, review test results, and prepare for the patient’s arrival to the emergency room. Videos will be archived for later review.
The app will help the hospital more efficiently distribute its care team and resources since it will be able to determine a patient’s condition before their arrival.
Washington Hospital Center has already rolled out the CodeHeart app at six hospitals. The center serves patients who live as far as hundreds of miles away from Washington D.C., which means enabling physicians and first responders to communicate ahead of time could be a crucial element of the new service.
The BBC is planning a ’news gatherer’ app that will let ’citizen journalists’ file stories directly from their phones, which can be on the air within minutes. NewMediaAge reports via @DMcDonald01.
Theoretically, the ”news gatherer app” will be able to feed user-generated content into the BBC’s content-management system, which is then edited by editorial staff and aired within minutes of submission.
Less than a year after it launched its photo-sharing service for the iPhone, Instagram has more than 10 million users who are uploading an average of 26 new pictures every second, co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Earlier this year, a few of Instagrammers who live in and around London organised their first Instameet, a ‘real-life’ meetup for avid Instagram app users.
Following that first Instameet, helped to grow by Instagramers.com (a worldwide network of avid Instagrammers), many other meetups were organised, where the idea of having an Exhibition was born.
My World Shared is the first exhibition by IGers London. IGers London are a group of individuals from London and beyond with a shared passion for iPhoneography, and more specifically a free iPhone app called Instagram.
My World Shared captures the concept of Instagram – to record in images our world around us, our lives, our outlook, our views, and share that view with the rest of the world. It is an individual view, but one that others can relate to, like postcards from a friend.
Google’s Hangouts video conferencing feature – which lets multiple friends video conference each other at once – is coming to mobile devices, the company said. Silicon Republic reprots.
Among the first of the new features is a mobile version of Hangouts that users can activate by simply finding an active hangout in their friend Stream and tapping ‘join.’ This feature will be available on Android 2.3+ devices and will come soon to iOS devices.
A new Hangouts mobile app is also rolling out on Android today.
Fotobabble app lets you quickly create and easily add your voice to photos and instantaneously share those talking photos with friends.
According to Mashable, "what’s most impressive about Fotobabble is that, unlike the majority of photo sharing apps, it has a concrete plan for monetization. While people have used the consumer-facing app to send photos to grandma, make baby announcements and narrate their travel photos, businesses have also found the technology useful for interactive marketing campaigns."
Amateur photographers use the free iPhone app to filter camera-phone pictures and make them look as if they’ve been processed using old-fashioned darkroom techniques. Fashion enthusiasts—an image-obsessed group—are enamored with how Instagram turns a low-quality image into a moody composition.
At the tents in New York this week, editors, bloggers and publicity people are donning Instagram’s digital rose-colored glasses and uploading images by the thousands, to the chagrin of some professional photographers.
Forbes reviews Posterous, an app designed to help people easily privately share photos and videos with friends or family.
People can create individual Spaces for each of their social groups, such as family, rooommates or friends, or for special events such as weddings or parties. The groups can be public or private, but will likely be attractive to people who want to create their own private photo sharing groups.
Facial recognition technology always sounds scary in terms of privacy. Here's another one reported by Daily Tech.
The application's name is PittPatt and it allows a complete stranger to find your identity -- your real identity -- in under 60 seconds. Here's how it works. A client code calls the PittPatt interface with a picture it's taken. PittPatt jumps online and compares that picture to millions of images in Facebook and in Google Inc.'s image search, using advanced facial recognition technology. And within 60 seconds, it can identify an individual.
It also incorporates searches of public databases that allows it to make a good guess at your social security number. If it knows your date of birth (e.g. if your Facebook profile is public), there's a good chance it can ID your social security number.
... PittPatt was a Carnegie Mellon University research project, which spun off into a company post 9/11. At the time, U.S. intelligence was obsessed with using advanced facial recognition to identify terrorists. So the DARPA poured millions into PittPatt. The company was recently purchased by Google.
According to the BBC, a smart phones become more accessible, some with built in speech and Braille output, it is possible for people with sight loss to get slivers of visual assistance when there's no one else around to ask.
Want to know what colour your shirt is? Use a colour detector app. Want to know if it is still daylight outside? Use a light detector app. Want to read a notice on your work's noticeboard? Use a text recognition app, of course.
The most recent visual assistance product to hit the app store is VizWiz. As well as giving you automated image recognition from intelligent software, it throws your questions open to a small band of volunteers standing-by on the internet - a human cloud, willing to donate ten seconds of their time here and there to describe photos which come in.
A group of Purdue University researchers have been working with police for the better part of a year to develop technology that will transform Android smartphones carried by officers into portable graffiti databases. Journal and Courrier reports.
The project is being introduced as GARI, for Gang Graffiti Automatic Recognition and Interpretation.
"You take a picture with an Android mobile phone, and it not only records the image, it also records the GPS coordinates, the date and time," said David S. Ebert, Silicon Valley professor of electrical and computer engineering.
"It can provide some analysis right on the phone and also can access a more extensive database of graffiti on a server."
Photovine, Google's answer to the mobile photo-sharing craze, went live in the iTunes App Store yesterday.
The app, which is only available on iOS to start, puts a somewhat unique spin on social photo publishing by grouping images into common themes, or "vines."
There's something uniquely appealing about the strips of snapshots produced by the classic photo booth, and a new app brings similar capabilities to today's mobile devices. PopBooth is a free app that can turn four photos into a strip for sharing on or offline.
PSFK reports on Google video's app update which now lets you rent movies on your Android phone.
This update, which was rumored early last month, now allows users to watch movie rentals from the Android Market as well as personal videos stored on your smartphone. The app also lets you manage the movies you’ve rented and displays a list of the most-rented titles.
The group of developers contacted me to say that the group of developers has abandoned the project. They created an experimental app using tools from Face.com and tested it with 30 of their friends. Their plan had been to release a Facebook app to the public so that people in the UK could volunteer to scan riot photos to see if any of the ne’er-do-wells were friends of theirs.
They also gave me access to the app to give it a try. The results were too disappointing for the digilantes to actually release it.
It wasn’t identifying people it should (friends of the guinea pigs) with high degrees of confidence, and it was saying with relatively high degrees of confidence that rioters were people who they were not.
In my test, the app was 22% sure that this alleged thief is a marketing acquaintance of mine in New York and it was 58% sure that this troublemaker is a teacher I know in California.
The above image is from the UK police Flickr account, asking members of the public to assist in identifying pictures they post of the rioters.
A new app has arrived at the iTunes store that may violate Apple's own policy of keeping pornographic material off its app store. Cnet reports.
The company has given its blessing to the Cinemax Max Go app, which provides on-demand access to movies and programming on mobile devices to the cable channel's subscribers. The app also includes a Max After Dark tab, which allows streaming of some of the channel's softcore programming, which helped earned Cinemax the nickname "Skinemax."
The app includes a disclosure that states users must be at least 17 years old to download the app because, among other things, it includes "frequent/intense sexual content or nudity." It also contains parental controls designed to prevent children from viewing racy material. However, as first pointed out by GigaOm, the programming being made available on iPads appears to violate Apple's own anti-porn policy.
Favorite Jan Chipchase on the facial recognition revolution for CNN.
... The mainstreaming of facial recognition technology, which through smartphones will literally be in the palm of your hand. The ability to identify someone at a moment's notice by snapping a photo of him or her, to trigger an immediate influx of data about the person behind the face, will forever change the world.
Who wouldn't want to know more about the people in the world around them?
Imagine being able to pull up a résumé, Facebook profile, tax records and vital statistics just by taking a photograph. Consider how this will change social interaction and dynamics in public spaces - on the streets, at a conference, on campus, at an anti-government protest, in the personal care aisle of your local supermarket and in nightclubs.
... The technology is already here, and it’s not just in the form of government agencies on the lookout for terrorists or criminals. There exist fun mobile-phone apps like FaceDouble that analyze faces and compare them to those of celebrities, a contemporary parlor trick fueled by algorithms and some retailers are building up profiles of consumer's shopping behaviors via one-way cameras in shop displays.
In addition, with each photo and detail about your life you're posting online, you're adding to a rich, constantly updated dataset: Who in your social network has "checked in" to the same restaurants via foursquare; friends tagging you in a photo as you roll up to a bar; your geo-tagged Instagram photos.
These are the building blocks that the facial-recognition software can cross-reference, building a profile of you based not only what you write or has been written about you, but about what you look like and have looked like. Even if you don’t state your ethnic background anywhere on LinkedIn or whether you are married with children, a scan of your photos and other people's photos featuring you will make it far easier to deduce.
The same company behind the technology that allows bank customers to deposit checks by camera phone is entering the healthcare business. MobileHealthNews reports.
Mitek Systems, Del Mar, Calif., is now offering its mobile imaging technology through an API so smartphone app developers can automate paper-based processes.
The new Mitek Mobile Imaging Cloud, which runs on the Amazon Cloud, captures images through smartphone cameras, extracts data from each image, populates forms and forwards the information to appropriate channels. Suitable healthcare documents might include paper prescriptions, physician superbills, insurance forms and patient history forms, according to DeBello, because they represent such tedious processes.
Healthcare “is one of our priorities,” Mitek CEO James DeBello tells MobiHealthNews. “Providers are trying to engage patients and consumers in a better user experience,” DeBello says.
He gives the example of a submitting expense reports and receipts to get reimbursed through a healthcare flexible spending account. “I literally have to go to the copy machine to copy my bills and receipts, fill out a form by hand, then fax the form by hand,” DeBello laments. If all goes well, a check shows up by snail mail a few days later.
Instead, how about snapping a picture of each document to populate an electronic reimbursement form that gets submitted in a matter of seconds? As soon as the FSA administrator approves the charges, payment gets sent electronically.
TechCrunch writes about Japan-based musical instrument maker Kawai which has developed a camera app that scans music notes printed on paper and plays them back in real-time. Dubbed Gakufu Camera [JP], the app is said to be the first of its kind.
Kawai claims the app also works with handwritten notes, those printed in different colors and under weak lighting.
Gakufu Camera also offers a few other bells and whistles, for example a function that allows you to store the notes you scanned first and play the melody afterwards.
OpenWatch is a participatory citizen media project aiming to provide documentary evidence of uses and abuses of power.
OpenWatch consists of two parts, a mobile phone application for Android and iOS which invisibly records audio and video, and some simple server side software to collect the recordings.
UNICEF is pleased to announce their new iPhone app, UNICEF Photography, which showcases their efforts to advance children’s rights to health, development, education and protection.
Users of the iPhone now have one more way to see the work that UNICEF is doing around the world to advance children’s rights.
The app’s features include:
-- Photos of the Week: An editor’s pick
-- Can You See Me?: Profiles of individual children
-- In Focus: Mini-reports on children’s lives and the UNICEF’s work to improve their situations
Celebrating the twenty-five years of artist collaborations with Beck’s Art Labels, Beck’s has released a new project which will showcase a thousand new art projects worldwide via an augmented-reality application. PSFK reports.
From July to September, thirty Green Boxes will be set up around the world, displaying commissioned projects in augmented reality, viewable via the Beck’s Key iPhone app. Users of the application can also access exclusive information about the pieces and submit their own artworks for review.
The app, called TagSense, offers “greater sophistication” in tagging photos than Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa.
“In our system, when you take a picture with a phone, at the same time it senses the people and the context by gathering information from all the other phones in the area,” Xuan Bao, a doctoral student in computer science at Duke, said in a university news release.
The app currently is a prototype. Researchers said a public version of the app could be available in a few years.
TechCrunch Europe writes up a new iPhone medical app called Skin Scan, which claims to reinvent skin cancer prevention.
The app lets users easily scan and monitor moles over time and is a real help in diagnosis and survey of skin lesions.
Because it also asks for your location, Skin Scan is also producing a live map of how our moles are looking around the globe. The implication for the app are very interesting – Skin Scan could end up mapping skin cancer rate across the planet, if it gets this right.
The app takes a picture of a mole on the skin, then uses a proprietary algorithm to look at the fractal-like shapes which exist in human skin (have a look up close, you can see little triangles in normal skin, honest). It then calculates if the shape of the mole means it is is developing normally, or abnormally thus in a into a potential cancerous melanoma.
If MIT and some Google researchers have their way, you'll soon be able to just snap a photo of a web page on your Mac screen to open it on your phone, writes TUAW.
A new system called Deep Shot transfers an open application to a cellphone then automatically resizes the application window to match the framing of the photo.
In March, Color unveiled its photo-sharing cellphone app — and revealed that it had raised $41 million from investors before the app had a single user. Despite the company’s riches, the app landed with a thud, attracting few users and many complaints from those who did try it. The New York Times reports.
Color spent $350,000 to buy the Web address color.com, and an additional $75,000 to buy colour.com. It rents a cavernous office in downtown Palo Alto, where 38 employees work in a space with room for 160, amid beanbag chairs, tents for napping and a hand-built half-pipe skateboard ramp.
Since then, Color has become a warning sign for investors, entrepreneurs and analysts who fear there is a bubble in start-up investing.
The BBC is developing an app that will allow its reporters in the field to file video, stills and audio directly into the BBC system from an iPhone or iPad, reports journalism.co.uk.
The new app, due to be in use within a month or so, is also intended to allow reporters to broadcast live from an iPhone using only 3G signal.
The broadcaster is looking to obtain a site licence to use Lucy Live – a piece of software it already uses – to allow reporters to go live on air directly from an iPhone using 3G.
The development will mean BBC reporters could potentially broadcast live from anywhere with 3G signal and will no longer have to rely on WiFi or carry cumbersome satellite or codex equipment.
You can use Socialcam to record video, or import clips from your camera roll. There’s no limit on how long your clip can be. You don’t need to think about uploading, because Socialcam automatically uploads the clip to its own servers in the background, and shares them from there.
Came in my inbox. Fun! VideoMask lets you record a video message through a mask using you own eyes and mouth
Simply choose an image, line up the facial features and create your video. Images can be loaded from the iPhone photo library or taken with the camera, and several pre-made masks are included to get you started. VideoMasks can then be saved to the iPhone library or shared from within the app via Email, Facebook and Youtube.
VideoMask will be available from the app store from Friday 15th April 2011.
According to the WSJ, smartphone venders are integrating content and services in their devices, in what is poised to be the next phase in the mobile wars.
HTC Corp. Tuesday released its first smartphone, the HTC Sensation 4G, that comes with the company's own video service. Using the service, owners will be able to rent or purchase more than 600 movies or TV shows via their phone.
... Analysts say manufacturers are increasingly adding more in-house capabilities to integrate into their smartphones to stand out as the space heats up. Apple with its iTunes service is the farthest ahead in the race, especially when it comes to integrating the content across multiple devices such as televisions and PCs, they say.
Spotted on NY1, ZoomReader, a new app for iPhone and Android for people with low vision.
In combination with your iPhone’s built-in camera, ZoomReader lets you magnify and read text by first taking a picture of an object like a book or menu, then converting the image into text using state of the art Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. ZoomReader will then read the text back to you using a natural sounding voice.
Color, launched for iPhones and Android phones, allows people to shoot photos for the app and share instantly with others geographically around you and running the same app - including strangers. Built-in SMS and text messaging keeps the conversation going.
CamTranslator is a universal translator, which lets you point your phone’s camera at printed text in one language and translate words into more than 50 different languages ranging from English, French, Spanish and German to Korean, Russian, Afrikaans, and Persian.
Bits writes up Bubbli, a stealth Silicon Valley start-up that is inventing a new type of photographic experience it calls “bubbles”, demonstrated at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif.
The “bubbles” are 360-degree images that take advantage of the location, accelerometer and camera capabilities of mobile phones. They can also be embedded in Web pages.
The effect is somewhat akin to being able to manipulate Google Streetview through tilting and moving the mobile device around, instead of using a mouse.
A pair of new apps, launched via a collaboration between 
Keeping up with his reputation as the first "Internet President," Barack Obama got in on the popular photo-sharing app 
Most cameras and mobile phones in Japan automatically make shutter sounds when they are used to take a photograph, a feature that makes it difficult for perverts to secretly capture upskirt images. Smart phone such as the iPhone usually allow users to disable all sounds, but iPhones sold in Japan have been altered to keep the shutter sound on.
Staff in retail outlets are ringing up customers with mobile devices in larger numbers this holiday season, and are integrating in-store shopping apps to facilitate sales as brick-and-mortar retailers aim to better serve customers and streamline a sometimes combative shopping environment. 
A new smartphone app will help you transition your old paper photos into the digital age. Called 
Less than a year after it launched its photo-sharing service for the iPhone, 
Earlier this year, a few of Instagrammers who live in and around London organised their first Instameet, a ‘real-life’ meetup for avid 
Google’s Hangouts video conferencing feature – which lets multiple friends video conference each other at once – is coming to mobile devices, the company said. 
Facial recognition technology always sounds scary in terms of privacy. Here's another one reported by 
According to the 
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There's something uniquely appealing about the strips of snapshots produced by the classic photo booth, and a new app brings similar capabilities to today's mobile devices. 
After a group of digilantes formed a 
A 
UNICEF is pleased to announce their new iPhone app, 
Celebrating the twenty-five years of artist collaborations with 
In March, 
Spotted on 
