'Second Screen'. Super Bowl marketers bet on mobile

In what is being marketed as the first "second screen" Super Bowl, the game's promoters and advertisers are offering interactive experiences aimed at getting people to spend more money and time on mobile phones and devices. USA Today reports.

Roughly 60% of Super Bowl viewers will use their phones during the game, says a survey by Velti, a mobile marketing firm. An E-Trade survey says 31% of viewers expect to use Facebook and 6% will be on Twitter. "This is the first year where you'll see fans using the cellphone more often than the remote," says Krishna Subramanian of Velti. "Advertisers are trying to figure out how to leverage the second or third screen."

Read more.

iPhone 4S camera reportedly removed from Singapore carriers

The camera of the iPhone 4S is usually touted as a highlight feature, but Singapore's carriers may soon be offering Apple's flagship phone with both shooters removed — thanks to some aftermarket modding. CNet Asia reports via The Verge.

It's said to be part of an initiative from Apple's three carrier partners in Singapore, who hope to sell the iPhone to military personnel prohibited from carrying phones with cameras due to security concerns (RIM has provided camera-free BlackBerry devices in the past for similar reasons).

Read full article.

Death By Smartphone: How Mobile Photography Helped Kill Kodak

Well, it's official. After years of struggling, photographic services giant Kodak is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Wall Street Journal via ReadWriteWeb reports.

The news comes almost exactly one year after the last roll of Kodachrome film was developed and at a time when the most widely-used camera on Flickr is the iPhone 4.

... The ubiquity of digital and mobile photography didn't single-handedly drive Kodak into bankruptcy, but it may well have delivered the final blow. Even the company's attempts to get into the digital photography market with its EasyShare line of point-and-shoots couldn't keep up with the explosion of the smartphone, nor was its printer business successful enough to make up for its losses from the death of film.

Read more.

Super Bowl to be streamed online and to phones for first time

The Super Bowl will be streamed online and to phones for the first time, the NFL said Tuesday. NBC's broadcasts of wild card Saturday, the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl will be available on the league's and network's websites and through Verizon's NFL Mobile app.

The service will include additional camera angles, in-game highlights and live stats — and replays of those always popular Super Bowl ads.

[via USA Today]

Photoshopped or Not? A Tool to Tell

A proposed software tool is intended to address concerns about the prevalence of highly idealized and digitally edited images in advertising and fashion magazines. The New York Times reports.

... Feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to “discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.”

Dr. Hany Farid said he became intrigued by the problem after reading about the photo-labeling proposals in Europe. Categorizing photos as either altered or not altered seemed too blunt an approach, he said.

Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic.

Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Introduction to their paper:

In recent years, advertisers and magazine editors have been widely criticized for taking digital photo retouching to an extreme. Impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle- and blemish-free models are routinely splashed onto billboards, advertisements, and magazine covers.

The ubiquity of these unrealistic and highly idealized images has been linked to eating disorders and body image dissatisfaction in men, women, and children. In response, several countries have considered legislating the labeling of retouched photos.

We describe a quantitative and perceptually meaningful metric of photo retouching. Photographs are rated on the degree to which they have been digitally altered by explicitly modeling and estimating geometric and photometric changes. This metric correlates well with perceptual judgments of photo retouching and can be used to objectively judge by how much a retouched photo has strayed from reality

Read full article.

Pocket Projector for iPhone

Spotted on The Red Ferret, a new Pocket Projector will work with iPhone 4 and delivers an image up to 50” at 640×360 at 15 lumens.

Granted, that’s not a resolution that’s going to get you a lot of fine details, but it’s enough to watch videos on, and it’ll be better than looking at your screen.

Add-Ons Make Smartphone Cameras Nearly Picture Perfect

The New York Times on the companies producing inexpensive smartphone attachments that can easily convert a mobile phone into a mini-professional camera. These products include zoom, fisheye and ultra-up-close macro lenses — all designed to snap onto a smartphone and make photos look as if they were shot with an expensive single-lens reflex camera.

Above: A photo taken with an iPhone camera; left, and with a telephoto lens attached to the phone.

Facebook Is the Final Frontier in Amateur Porn

The cutting-edge of online smut is stalker porn: private sexy pics posted without their subjects' consent, paired with a screenshot of their Facebook profile. Gawker reports.

That's the model that's made IsAnyoneUp.com an increasingly popular destination in online porn, with 30 million pageviews a month. The site features nude pictures of young men and women, along with their real names and their Facebook account. Most of the pictures look like they were meant for private sexts with a lover, not the entire internet, and that's because many of them were.

... There's not much subjects can do to get their pictures taken down—all the pics are user submitted, so he's protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996. In fact, attempts to evade IsAnyoneUp's attention seems to get fans off even more. When one of IsAnyoneUp's subjects tried to vanish online, a "hoember alert" is put out.

Read more.

Apple prepping movie cloud service

Apple Inc. is preparing to put movies in the cloud, entering a market in which it may be both competitor and ally to a similar offering backed by most Hollywood studios. The Los Angeles Times reports.

Representatives of the iPhone and iPad maker have been meeting with studios to finalize deals that would allow consumers to buy movies through iTunes and access them on any Apple device, according to knowledgeable people who requested anonymity because the discussions are private. The service is expected to launch in late 2011 or early 2012.

Read more.

Conference honors first cameraphone photo taken in 1997

Bolt | Peters and Blurb are honoring the date the first camera phone photo was taken, June 11, 1997, with a one-day conference dedicated to iPhoneography and mobile photography called 1197.

[via The Laughing Squid]

According to Wikipedia, the irst camera-phone image (above) taken by Philippe Kahn at the birth of his daughter Sophie on June 11, 1997 and wirelessly shared with more than 2000 people around the world instantly.

Researchers Develop Remote, Real-Time Cell Phone Photo Search

Researchers at Rice University have developed a system for remotely searching images stored on mobile devices. Geek System reports.

The goal of the software, called Theia, is to give searchers a near-realtime view of what is being photographed on with now-ubiquitous camera phones. It’s like that bit in The Dark Knight where Batman turns every phone in Gotham into a sonar/microphone, except with pictures and it’s for real.

Read full article.

'London Riots Facial Recognition' Vigilantes Abandon Their Project

After a group of digilantes formed a Google Group last week dedicated to applying facial recognition technology to photos from the London riots to identify culprits, they gave up the idea because their app wasn't accurate enough.

The group’s organizer contacted Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill. She writes:

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.

Read full article.

Related facial recognition technology/app articles blogged on textually.

Police Chief Confirms Detaining Photographers Within Departmental Policy

According to The Long Beach Post, Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures "with no apparent esthetic value" is within Long Beach Police Department policy.

McDonnell spoke for a follow-up story on a June 30 incident in which Sander Roscoe Wolff, a Long Beach resident and regular contributor to Long Beach Post, was detained by Officer Asif Kahn for taking pictures of

... This policy apparently falls under the rubric of compiling Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) as outlined in the Los Angeles Police Department's Special Order No. 11, a March 2008 statement of the LAPD's "policy … to make every effort to accurately and appropriately gather, record and analyze information, of a criminal or non-criminal nature, that could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism.

Above: A photo taken by Sander Roscoe on June 30 at Edgington Oil Company before he was detained.

[via Dan Gilmore+]

London police asking the public to identify rioter pics on Flickr

As rioting continues to roil the streets of London, local police forces are turning to the Web to help unmask those involved in the torching and looting. Bits reports.

On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Police of London posted a set of photos on Flickr showing people they believed to be participants in the riots. Right now the images are primarily from the Croydon and West Norwood neighborhoods in south London, although the site says that more will be posted soon.

With the initiative, called Operation Withern, the police are asking the public to identify anyone they recognize from photographs captured by CCTV surveillance cameras in areas where stores were looted. They say on the Flickr page that they hope to “bring to justice those who have committed violent and criminal acts.”

Read more.

Google Group Members to Use Facial Recognition to Identify London Rioters

A new Google Group called “London Riots Facial Recognition” has appeared online, in the wake of the riots that rocked the U.K. capital over the weekend. The group’s goal is to use facial recognition technologies to identify the looters who appear in online photos. TechCrunch reports.

The group appears to be thoughtfully considering its actions, in threads titled “Ethical Issues,” and “Keeping Things Legal,” for example. They’ve also stated that “it’s important we only use legal sources for images.”

However, there’s a major “creepy” factor to this undertaking, too. The idea that a group of people would team up online to use (misuse?) facial recognition technologies in this way, notably outside professional law enforcement channels, seems like a modern take on vigilante style justice, where the torches of the angry villagers have turned into APIs and algorithms.

Read full article.

Your Facebook Photos Can Identify You In Real Life

Well, this is scary. Researchers have created software that uses public information to ID basically anybody just walking down the street. Stalkers, rejoice. Everyone else, time to find a comfortable mask that you'll never take off. Gizmodo reports.

Using facial recognition software and databases made of publicly accessible photos (profile photos from Facebook and LinkedIn that don't even require logging in to view, for example), researchers from Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University set up on a busy college campus and snapped pictures of willing passers by.

They were able to positively identify a 31 percent of these strangers within seconds.

Read full article.

How Ugly Do We Look After Exercising? Very

We all know we aren’t at our most attractive after working out. But how bad could we possibly look? I mean really? Bad.

Fast Company reports on French photographer Sacha Goldberger who snapped images of joggers in Paris immediately after a sprint, then again a week later in their regular clothes, in roughly the same pose. Placing the portraits side by side, the evidence crystallizes into incontrovertible fact: Running makes you ugly.

Read more. Via My Modern Metropolis.

Iran public execution outrages human rights groups

The Guardian reports on footage shows 'disturbing normality' of public executions with convicts hanged from bridge in front of crowds, including children.

This video, which was supplied to Amnesty by an Iranian human rights activist, Fazel Hawramy from kurdishblogger.com, highlights the use of public executions, in which officials publicly hang convicts from a large crane or a high place in front of crowds.

Activists said two weeks ago that Iran has executed an average of almost two people a day in the first six months of this year. Iran insists the executions are related to serious crimes such as drug-trafficking although at least two political activists have been identified among those hanged in the first half of 2011.

Amnesty International said Iranian authorities have acknowledged public executions of at least 28 people so far this year.

Read full article.

Google's Photovine

Though Google has said little publicly about Photovine, the service appears to be one in which consumers can take snaps from their phones and have them upload in a stream of pictures in the same way that tweets flow into Twitter. Presumably, if you subscribe to someone else's Photovine, you'll see their latest photos almost as soon as they shoot them.

[via CNet]

Apple Files Patents for Augmented Reality, Transparent Screen

According to Mobiledia, Apple on Friday filed two patents related to augmented reality.

The AR patent gives Apple a way to populate live photos and video feeds from iPads and iPhones with digital information, allowing users to easily identify unknown objects and places.

The "Transparent Electronic Device" patent would give the iPad the same capabilities as the AR patent, with the added bonus that people make the screen opaque or transparent on demand.

Read full article.

Google Search by Image

Now you can use an image instead of words to start your Google search.

Tenn. law bans posting images that "cause emotional distress"

Accoridng to arstechnica, Tennessee recently enacted legislation making it a crime to post images online that viewers find "emotionally distressing." Violations can get you almost a year in jail time or up to $2500 in fines.

Legal analysts think the law has serious constitutional problems.

This is the same State that recently passed a law which would make it a crime to use a friend’s password to login to Netflix.

Read full article.

Red Pop. The big red button for your iPhone Camera

Red Pop adds a big red button to your iPhone camera so you never miss the moment and that perfect shot. Fab!

If you are impressed by this project, Pledge $ 25 or more.

This project will only be funded if at least $20'000 is pledged by Saturday July 2nd.

UPDATE 20.35 pm: E-mail received from Red Pop by Beep IndustriesFriday, June 3, 2011 6:32 PM following my pledge of $ 25 to their project: If we could kiss you all we would. We have been live for just over a day now and are just over half way to our target. Aces. Well done!

Spotted on Swiss-Miss.

Pakistani tribal council bans mobile phones with camera

File under another world.

A community council in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has banned the use of mobile phones that have cameras. The meeting was convened to discuss the murder of Mohammad Yasin. He was killed last week for taking a picture of a local girl on his mobile phone.

[via Mangalorean]

Twitter to launch own photo sharing

Twitter is getting ready to announce its own photo-sharing service this week, according to a TechCrunch report that cited multiple anonymous sources.

Twitter users can already share photos on their Twitter streams via Twitpic and Yfrog, but as the report noted, a built-in service would have a significant advantage over competing apps.

[via News.com]

Facebook Uses PhotoDNA To Detect Child Porn

Facebook has started using an image-matching technology from Microsoft known as PhotoDNA, which allows it to detect evidence of child exploitation by scanning users' photos. The social networking giant will use the technology to prevent "child abuse material" from being uploaded and distributed by users on its website.

[via TechTree]

Reuters Defends Decision To Publish Bin Laden Compound Photos

The White House isn’t releasing photos of Osama bin Laden’s dead body, but that didn’t stop Reuters from publishing several gruesome photos Wednesday showing the aftermath of the U.S. raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and sending them to clients of the wire service.

Reuters defended that decision in a statement to The Huffington Post.

As this is a story of global importance, Reuters chose to share these photographs with its media clients and allow them to make editorial decisions on how they were used," a spokesperson said.

Read more.

The Secret Weapons Of Syrian Protesters: Pen Cameras

Protesters have developed a novel way of smuggling information to the outside world: trading in their mobile camera phones for small, discreet pen cameras. Fast company reports.

Military, police, and secret police are all reportedly confiscating cameras and mobile phones in an attempt to keep details of what's happening in Syria from the outside world. But local activists have found a solution: They've switched to the use of hard-to-detect pen cameras and even started an impromptu news network.

Read full article.

168 Incredible Cellphone Photos

Check out entries in Gizmodo's Cellphone Shooting Challenge. Time to admit that cellphones have developed into legitimate cameras.

'Binoculars' turn iPhone 3D

Hasbro has created an attachment that adds depth to the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch.

[via stuff]

UCF Student Turns Cell Phone Into Mobile Microscope to Detect Malaria

A group of college students at the University of Central Florida have figured out how to turn smart phones into virtual microscopes that can detect malaria from a digital snapshot of a patient’s blood sample. UCF Today reports.

Instead of placing a blood sample under a microscope in a lab, a doctor or nurse working in remote parts of Africa would simply snap a picture of the sample with a cell phone camera. Then an image analysis algorithm – devised as a phone app that Gibeau created – calculates and detects where the malaria clusters are based on blood cells’ location and staining.

The only special preparation a field doctor would have to do is place a drop of a dye that stains for the malaria parasite in the blood sample – the same way it’s done in a lab.

Read full article.

Sony to supply image sensors for Apple‘s iPhone 5

Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, accidentally told everyone in the world that his company will be supplying image sensors for Apple‘s iPhone 5. Mashable reports.

In an interview late Friday with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, the Sony chief was talking about earthquake damage to 15 of the Sony’s factories in Japan, and inadvertently mentioned that a camera sensor made in one of those plants is on its way to Apple, and that sensor would be delayed because of the quake and tsunami.

Stringer didn’t specifically say that Sony is building an 8-megapixel image sensor that will go into the iPhone 5, but since Sony is currently not manufacturing any image sensors for Apple, this confirmed that Sony plans to supply components of the iPhone 5.

Read full article.

Why glasses-free 3D is going to be a small-screen hit

The latest generation of 3D technology has seen mixed success at the cinema, and 3D TVs are yet to establish themselves in the living room. Perhaps the true home of 3D is on mobile devices, where you don't even need special glasses. New Scientist takes a look at the future of 3D on the move.

Taliban Texts Terror to Afghan Phones

Wired reports that the Taliban in Afghanistan are sending unsuspecting Afghans videos on their cell phones, warning them they will be targeted for death unless they change their infidel-loving ways and glorifying suicide bombers.

Australia. Law proposed against uploading violent images on the internet

The South Australian government wants to make it an offence to post violent or other degrading images on the internet. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

Attorney-General John Rau said the state's proposed legislation, to be introduced this year, would be the first of its kind in Australia.

It will make it an offence to knowingly take or publish humiliating, demeaning or degrading images of another person without their consent.

Mr Rau said it was designed to tackle thugs who filmed assaults and then posted them on the internet.

Read more.

Adobe Unveils Wallaby: Flash to HTML 5 Converter

Adobe introduced a new experimental tool on Tuesday called Wallaby that converts Flash content into HTML 5.

Right now Wallaby can handle a limited selection of Flash components, but it does offer a way to get at least some of the content developers are creating with Adobe’s multimedia tools onto devices like Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

Wallaby is available as a free download at the Adobe Labs Web site and requires Creative Suite 5.

[The Mac Observer]

Cops Roll Out Citizen Video Order

Citizens should no longer get arrested for using their cameras to record police actions in public according to a new official New Haven policy released Thursday. New Haven Independent reports.

“It is the policy of the New Haven Department of Police Service to permit video recording of police activity as long as such recording does not interfere with ongoing police activity or jeopardize the safety of the general public or the police,” the order reads.

“The video recording of police activity in and of itself does not constitute a crime, offense, or violation. If a person video recording police activity is arrested, the officer must articulate clearly the factual basis for any arrest in his or her case and arrest reports.

Read full article.

US Lawmaker seeks ban on cell phone photos of accidents - while driving

Pantagraph reports that a Belleville lawmaker wants to prevent people from taking cell phone photographs or videos of accidents while driving.

State Rep. Thomas Holbrook, a Democrat, is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit people from using cell phones to snap photos or shoot video within 500 feet of emergency scenes.

Holbrook said this behavior interferes with emergency personnel.

The House Transportation Committee approved the measure without opposition Wednesday, and now it will go to the House floor.

The legislation is House Bill 1984:

Amends the Illinois Vehicle Code. Provides that no person may use a wireless telephone while operating a motor vehicle within 500 feet of an emergency scene except for specified purposes. Adds digital photographs and video to the definition of "electronic message" in provisions prohibiting the use of electronic communication devices while operating a motor vehicle. Effective immediately.

Cell Phone Photo Class Is Not Just For Taking Pics

A new cell phone photography class at a Immaculata, suburban Philadelphia university, focuses on both the quality of the images and the ethical responsibilities that come with taking and publishing them. Issues such as voyeurism, citizen journalism and the difference between public and private spaces are part of the curriculum.

[via the npr]

Coming soon: Wave your hand to control your phone

Ttouchless gesture interface is coming to mobile phones from top-tier handset makers this year, promised Ofer Sadka, chief technology officer of a start-up called Extreme Reality based in Herzeliya, Israel, that's commercializing the technology. CNet reports from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

... Variations of gesticulation-sensitive interface are being used to flip through a photo gallery. One used close-range hand gestures, including rotating a fist to zoom in and out.

The other was from several feet away--it's got an 8-meter range--and used more sweeping arm motions, an experience more akin to Microsoft's Kinect game controller.

The touchless interface could be useful for controlling devices in a car, where a driver might for example not want to have to focus specifically on hitting the right button.

Read full article.

Related technologies:

-- Samsung Patents Visual Gesture Control

-- Cell Phone Uses Gesture Control

-- Synaptics Mobile Phone Concept includes gesture interface

-- Links to articles blogged by textually related to Air Texting

Police pay photographer thousands in deleted images row

A man has won $40,000 in damages after police in the United States confiscated his camera phone and deleted images he had taken of them in a public place. Amateur Photographer reports.

Marlon Kautz from Atlanta had been filming officers as they arrested someone last April when he was told he had no right to record them.

Kautz belongs to a group that films police activity using cameras and mobile phones. The aim of 'Copwatch' is that officers can be held accountable for any wrongdoing.

He claimed that one officer snatched the phone from his hand. 'Kautz said that when asked to get his phone back, another officer said he'd return it only after Kautz gave him the password… so he could delete the footage,' reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Kautz refused but when police returned his phone the images had been 'deleted, altered or damaged'.

Read more.

iPhone Photojojo Telephoto Lens

Spotted on [Technabob], an impressive photo lense for iPhone that retails for $35.

German firm develops internet eraser for photos

A German firm is poised to launch software allowing users to have photos uploaded to websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Flickr erased automatically after a certain time, its head said. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

The software should prevent the increasingly frequent occurrence of someone being refused a job or running into other embarrassing difficulties after posting a photo that maybe should have been kept private.

Before the user posts the photo, he or she drags it into the programme which assigns it an electronic key that is valid for a limited time period, said Michael Backes, founder of X-Pire.

If someone wishes to view that photo later, the server checks whether the photo has "expired" and blocks it from being displayed if its time is up.

Read full article.

Andre Agassi Showed Camphone Pic of Steffi Graf to boost an auction

In an effort to spice up an auction for an autographed dish, tennis legend Andre Agassi offered to show the winner a naked picture of his wife, Steffi Graf, right on his cellphone. The dish sold for over $4,000.

[via Gizmodo]

Philippines: Murdered politician photographed his killer before he was shot

A local councilman shot to death on New Year's Eve in the Philippines accidentally photographed his killer pointing a gun at him just before pulling the trigger. [boingboing via The Washington Post]

In the photo left, victim Reynaldo Dagsa's smiling family members are posed against a car; the alleged killer is at left, and an alleged lookout is at right. The photo led to the arrest of two suspects, one of whom was a car thief out on bail, presumed to be looking for revenge against Dagsa.