Insight Community

I remember the day I finally realised I couldn't live without a camera phone.  I was at a shopping mall in one of the poorer parts of town and on my way out there was a commotion near a childrens ride.  It was some type of jeep that you put a coin into and it makes noises and vibrates.  A rather portly adult had wedged himself into the jeep as a lark and couldn't get out.  His behind was stuck in the door, his shoulder was stuck out a window and his other arm was stuck in another window.  He couldn't budge and two of his friends were standing around the ride laughing at him.  I decided right then that I should always have a camera phone on me.

I use my camera phone for ad hoc pictures, I use it at home and at work or traveling.  I put the photos on my Facebook profile, I take some of them for my blog and I take some for printing for family albums.

There are two things I want from camera phone applications: make it easier to manage my photos and make me a better photographer.  For managing photos - a way to name and tag them quickly so I don't lose track of them.  It would need to use the predictive text features of my camera for faster typing and make the selection of commonly used tags easier to add.  It would also come with the ability to tag a photo with multiple entries in my contacts list.  This tagging would be compatible with Facebook and popular online photo sharing sites that support photo tagging.

For making me a better photographer I would like a graphics application that looks at a photo and gives some advice for improving the quality using the phone camera settings.  A central database of tips would let you choose a camera model and download tips that are matched to your camera - these tips would be matched to common picture taking problems such as shaky photos, low light, over exposure etc.  The tips would tell you what settings and modes you have on your camera phone that could help fix the problem.  Because the tips are tailored for specific phone models I would pay to get one for my phone.

This would change the current approach of picture enhancement from trying to fix things after the photo has been taken to preventing the picture problem from occurring in the first place - and it would make me a better photographer.  My own mobile Idiots Guide to My Camera Phone.  The application would need to be smart enough to examine a photo and find out what is wrong with it.  The target users would be people with good camera phones that have a few adjustable settings.

There's no doubt that the carrier's preferred way of using the camera on the phone hasn't panned out. Somehow, people just weren't enamored with the prospect of snapping a photo and sending it via $1 MMS. Wow. Who knew that in an age of unlimited data, 10 years after the popularization of unlimited email on the desktop, people would balk at $1 to send a photo.

And historically, there has been no easy way to get the photo out of the phone for free. The upshot is that most photos taken on a phone may get used as wallpaper or other phone displays, but never leave the phone. The lens becomes a novelty that wears off as people realize it doesn't integrate with their existing photo collection. To see the scope of the problem, have a look at these Google results for the search term "Get photos off mobile phone". Clearly, this is a pain point.

This problem was totally obvious by 2004, yet to this day, I still hear new startups tell me the problem (as if it's a revelation), and then explain that they have a solution. If you're a startup just out of the gates today with such a solution, you've got an uphill battle to wage against the people two years ahead of you.

Ultimately, will it be startups who provide the solution, or standards bodies? I propose the latter. Really, what's going to allow people to move photos out of their phones in the near future is phones with greater functionality, built in an era of decreasing power of walled gardens. More and more phones feature at least one of: Bluetooth with file transfer profiles enabled, a removable memory card, an open OS with standard apps for moving photos, an email enabled phone that allows emailing photos, a smartphone that syncs to desktop software, a phone with a USB cable that can act as a mass storage device to your PC. I've got a Nokia N95 that actually has PictBridge software built-in.

But you want to know what people are using today? I'm using Kyte.tv. Kyte is a website to which you can post videos, photos, slideshows, etc. and create your own "TV" channel. It's not much different from youtube or hundreds of others in that respect. But Kyte has some of the best mobile integration options that I've seen. For example, they have a client for Series 60 devices (the world's most popular smartphone platform), which can use the phone's camera and sent photos, video clips, and even real-time streaming feeds to your TV channel. Not only does this help you move pictures out of your phone, but in fact, those pictures NEVER really get stored on your phone...they are moved to the TV channel immediately. Think of your phone behaving more like a USB camera plugged into your channel than as a separate picture device. Kyte's downfall is it's horrible website, which looks like it had a UI designed by a scatterbrained insomniac. Menus, buttons, hidden menus, are placed all over the screen. Information Architecture done as Picasso draws a portrait. Upside: instant facebook and myspace integration, so that you don't have to visit the website other than to set up your channel...of course that assumes you like the facebook or myspace UI.

Popular photo sites are developing and improving mobile tools. For example Flickr is fully accessible through the Yahoo! Go Mobile application. Radar is a service that can use the WAP interface. Photobucket has a mobile site that allows photo upload from phones through the email channel, but also offers a way to move photos into the phone. Other solutions that leverage phone email include MobilePUP, Kodak Gallery, and Phlog. Sharpcast and Shozu, like Kyte.tv, has software that is installed on the device and sends the photos to a counterpart on the web using the data connection. Shozu seems to be a leader with respect to awareness in the market.

Other available solutions include USB kits from third party vendors like Susteen DataPilot, Mobile Action, and Future Dial.

The idea of a camera on a mobile phone has been around for about 10 years but has really become common place for less then 5 years.

Personally I have found limited uses for my camera to date:

• photo reminders or a to do list mind jogger
• potential use for evidence in the event of a car accident
• occasional photos if I don't have my camera with me

However there are many users out there that do use their cameras more frequently. To help this market get the best out of their photography there are a series of application providers that assist in unloading, storing and sharing the output of the little clear lens on the back of your hand phone:

• Shozu - Takes the images and uploads them to Flickr for easy sharing with friends
• ZoneTag - Another Flickr manager that also adds cell tags to help with the location mapping of the image
• Radar - Works differently by sharing images through MMS broadcast to your friends as well being able to manage them on the web

A different approach is Waymarkr, I first saw this application trialled on UK Channel 5's the Gadget Show.  The camera is used to take stop motion, as used in cartoons and flick books, to "film" your day as you walk around your environment.  You then get to see a CCTV like film of your travels that you can then share with your friends.

The services mentioned so far are all free but starting to make an impact.  SprintNextel are looking to use the camera phone as an additional revenue stream and are offering PhotoShare for a nominal fee.

This social networking and community concept works well with the camera phone is on the leading edge of a larger trend of community generated content that will start to form the core of mobile communication over the next 5 years or so.  But what are the other uses for that handy phone cam?

1. Instant reminders and minutes of meetings - I do use the camera to take a snap shot record of work carried out on a whiteboard before it's lost to the cleaners.  Qipit offer an opportunity to capture images and documents translate to PDF and share with your community.  In a more virtual team where co-location is not a given this kind of application could become very useful to the mobile workforce.  An additional use of the camera phone in a business meeting context is to take photos of those attending to help you remember names and who was there.
2.  Advanced uses, SpotCodes - trial runs have been performed of using simple circular images that can be used by a camera phone and bluetooth service for information and advertising. ShotCode has used this technology in marketing campaigns.  Additional examples of how the technology could be used are available on DeviceForge.  This kind of usage could be a key growth area for the average consumer to use their camera phone for more then play time and could be a first step towards a practical application.

I use 2 favorite mobile photo tools on my Nokia N95. The first is the default Life Blog app and second is the Flickr upload tool.

Firstly, the Life Blog app on my Nokia N95 is able to upload pictures to my Wordpress blog. This is because I have managed to add in a hack into it and I can now post pictures and wordpress postings to my blog. Its fairly simple to hack as we only need to add in some files to the wordpress blog. So far, the grip I have with it is that the pictures can't be resize to a resolution that we want.

Secondly, I use Flickr pretty often as we can send it fairly easy. After taking a picture on the mobile phone, I can then send photos there with the title as the subject line and description in the message body. If I like to tag the photos, then I just add a line to the description formatted like this example: “tags: holiday, rome, september”.

My Motorola phone was nearly useless until I found a good photo-managing application. To get a photo off my phone, I had to navigate through all the following menus!

Multimedia / Pictures / View / Menu / Send In Message / OK / Add Email Address / Done

I solved this problem with the Motorola Phone Tools ENU at my T-Mobile store.

It was a little annoying having to buy this separately — it cost almost $40 — but it allows easy synching with the PC to download all the photos. The software displays thumbnails of every picture and lets me select which ones I want. (And I'm also able to upload photos to my cellphone, if there's an image I want as my cellphone background.) It even lets me put a Christmas-y "frame" around photos, or upload appropriate clip art for inserting into messages.

But it doesn't do everything. For example, it won't rotate the photos, which can leave images tilted 90 degrees. Once an image is on my PC, though, I adjust it using Paint Shop Pro. (Since Motorola's Phone Tools software displays the photos as a directory of files, clicking their thumbnails will prompt Windows to display them automatically in the graphics-editing software I've associated with image files.) The Motorola package really needs a better way to review images, but I've found a way to work around that. I created an HTML web page on my hard drive to display each downloaded image at a more appropriate size!

The software does have a lot of other features. Cellphone photos can be converted into a desktop wallpaper image or even a screensaver. And other features offer the luxurious ability of updating your calendar and phone book using your computer's keyboard, or even using it to send text messages. Unfortunately, the interface for all these features is surprisingly difficult. So yes, the Motorola Phone tools offers a lot of capabilities, both for mobile photos and other applications.

But I'd probably use them more often if the softeware were easier to use!

My camera phone usage with my Treo 650 probably falls very squarely in the middle ground here, perhaps making me a sort of "Joe Sixpack" of cellular photography.    Although I put a *lot* of pictures online my preference is a quality digital picture uploaded to Flickr.    I'd like to have a seamless way to get the Treo pix online but, frankly, I have not prioritized this after many frustrations trying to overcome other Treo deficiencies.

When I don't have my camera with me, which is "too often", I wind up taking some interesting pix on the Treo from internet conferences and such.  Unfortunately these do not find their way online quickly because synching the Treo is a laborious process and then I have to process and upload to Flickr.  Not a huge technical deal, but just one more task that often finds its way to the "later" pile of things to do.

Many would suggest I should find a good way to upload the pictures to my blog or to a site right after I take them, but this is generally not going to be convenient for me, especially in a conference setting where you might get a shot of an internet luminary but won't be able to take the time to upload it until later.

The solution for me to get my camera phone pix online fast?   A Treo application that would seamlessly upload my pictures to my Flickr account without any extra steps.  

The solution for others?   I assume there are many in the same boat as me - they take a lot of camera pictures but then  load those to the computer and then upload to photo sites.     Flickr's superb uploader makes this fairly easy, but in total it is a chore to take the steps needed from phone to PC to Flickr.    I understand some web-enabled cameras make the upload process fairly seamless, and I think this seamlessness is the key facilitator of getting pix online.

WayMarkr is a very cool idea but has a technophobe problem that is best explained simply by noting the wording in "step 1" of their installation instructions, which I assume are actually pretty easy - they just don't sound like it and people therefore may not even look any further:
1. Download WayMarkr to your Internet enabled Series 60 mobile phone by entering http://get.waymarkr.com in your mobile device's browser.

3guppies also looks like it has great potential as a photo sharing community, but already appears to be suffering from content challenges.    As an internet professional I'm reluctant to send people to a service where easy clicks off the home page for "sexy" photos will get content that'll make my mom, let alone wife, annoyed with me for using the service.   Phil Kaplan of Adbrite started a mobile photo sharing service and noted that it quickly became a "porn" sharing service.  I'd like to stick to Flickr's community, so all I really want is a way to easily get my mobile pix there fast.

The good news.   One can almost guarantee that the Open Handset Alliance innovations will include this type of seamless picture upload for any web-enabled phone, and will also increase the number of web-enabled phones dramatically.  Expect to see a lot of innovation in this space starting....last week!