Phone Cameras?

Tags: Business,  Design,  Devices,  Mobile applications
December 23, 2005 by Barbara

As photojournalists say, "the best camera is the one you have with you". Mobile phones, as devices which are always carried, are thus prime candidates to have cameras. It's thus no surprise that camera phones have become quite popular recently.

However, people who own mobile phones, even camera phones, continue to purchase separate digital cameras. Why? They have more storage, they are optimized for taking pictures, and they take better pictures. These advantages are likely to stay - especially the design optimization. But are they really doing everything they ought to?

Consider, if you will, a camera with communications capabilities. It could have SMS or some other push technology, J2ME, and ideally location (perhaps GPS) built in. Connectivity could be any wireless connectivity, preferably something with good coverage. A Bluetooth connection to a mythical modem-phone would be ideal.

The location technology would be used to add metadata to pictures - in addition to time and date, place would be stored. When a server is available, the latitude and longitude would be converted to city, country, state, and ideally neighborhood or other more relevant data (dinner at "TGI Fridays in Duluth" would be very useful for finding the picture again).

J2ME would allow the user to download relevant applications that the camera manufacturer might not want to make. A Flickr application could post pictures directly to the user's online account, live. A blogging application could take a picture, attach a voice recording from the built-in microphone, and post the result to a moblog or podcast site.

Higher end cameras (either professional or the slightly lower featured prosumer) might have available a "breaking news" type application in which a picture is submitted to the media source(s) of the user's choice immediately.

A particularly interesting J2ME application could add metadata based on face recognition. One face could be defined as being "Bob"; whenever that face was recognized in any picture, Bob gets added to one of the content metadata fields.

SMS could allow sending a relevant URL to an automatically-posted picture to a set of people. It could also push updates.

Each of these services could provide a nice revenue to some set of companies. Carriers might want to add a camera service for the masses, or a camera MVNO could be established.


«« Location-Based Services Recommendations  |  Accessing lots of content on the small screen »»

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.