Reiter's Camera Phone Report

TV Commerce Holdings offers palm readings via camera phone photos

From cellular-news I learned that TV Commerce Holdings is offering a palm reading service in the U. K. that uses a camera phone photo of your palm to provide psychic readings. 

Send a photo to one of your palm and one of the (so-called) psyhics will send you the results of the reading via SMS.   The service is available over O2, Vodafone, Orange, 3 and T-Mobile. 

The cellular palm reading service was tested on a television program, Your Destiny TV (see below), with clairvoyant Joe Power and the response from viewers resulted in additional revenues for the show.

 

Based on the quality of most camera phone photos, these palm readers certainly need psychic abilities in order to puzzle out the lines in the fuzzy images!

TV Commerce Holdings also is testing a TV date service, "Date with Destiny," that enables viewers to send photos and messages to studio hosts. 

If you believe this...  

In 1976 a great movie, "Network," poked fun of the stupidication (my made up word!) of television.   One of the programs in the line up -- part of the news department of a TV network -- featured a psychic. 

Ah -- found it -- "Sybil the Soothsayer."  This was supposed to be satire, something that wouldn't happen in real life.

Reality imitates fiction. 

Indeed, for years there have been programs featuring psychics, such as one program (I forgot the name) hosted by a guy who claimed to be able to communicate with the dead.

I suspect the next camera phone service will be reading tea leaves.  Send a photo of the leaves in the bottom of your tea cup and for a few dollars (pounds, francs, etc.) psychics will predict your future -- in 160 characters or less. 

Foote Cone & Belding, NeoMedia to co-market barcodes for wireless promotions

Advertising agency Foote Cone & Belding and barcode software company NeoMedia Technologies have entered into a co-marketing agreement to explore opportunities to use NeoMedia's PaperClick barcode technology in wireless-based advertising promotions, according to the NeoMedia press release.

The release says, "The agreement calls for Foote Cone & Belding to work with NeoMedia to develop opportunities and marketing campaigns utilizing PaperClick, and facilitate the introduction of NeoMedia and PaperClick in the mobile telecommunications industry.

"NeoMedia will provide technical and sales support for presentations and marketing programs co-developed for Foote Cone & Belding clients and work with Foote Cone & Belding to explore and create marketing opportunities and innovative solutions for its business customers.

"Foote Cone & Belding and NeoMedia will team for co-marketing and sales efforts in the U.S., as well as in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America."

Wireless in marketing

Pam Larrick, the chairman and CEO of FCBi, the direct, digital and customer relations arm of Foote Cone & Belding, says, "Mobile marketing is increasingly becoming an important tool in our arsenal for clients around the world.  In this new frontier we are continually evaluating partners and techniques in order to give our clients a true competitive advantage.

"With PaperClick, a brand can instantly let a targeted customer enter a contest, buy a movie ticket or get a coupon through their mobile devices.  The possibilities go on and on."

I've written many times before that I think camera phone-based barcode services could be useful for consumer and business applications.  One of the interesting is what barcode technology to use.  Should the wireless industry use standard barcodes -- that offer limited information storage and weren't designed to work well with camera phones' optics -- or employ barcode technologies designed for camera phones.

Wooster Collective offers street art as camera phone wallpapers

The Wooster Collective, a group that promotes street art (this goes way beyond so-called graffiti), is selling images for downloads to cellular phones (see below), according to an article in The New York Times.

The article says, "Calling it a 'curated online art gallery for your mobile phone,' the founders of the Web site, woostercollective.com, are hoping it will provide a new way for struggling young artists to make money, in much the same way that a songwriter can earn money from radio play or an actor from reruns.

"Many of the images in the project's first "gallery show" are familiar ones to fans of the kinds of stickers, wheat-paste posters, freehand graffiti and stenciled paintings known as street art, which appear on walls, mailboxes and bus stops in cities around the world.

"Some practitioners, like Shepard Fairey, a Los Angeles artist considered one of the fathers of sticker art, have significant followings and have been able to land gallery shows and lucrative design and marketing work for clothing and record companies."

Helping strugglng artists

The wallpapers are $1.99 each and compatible with U.S. GSM cellular operators Cingular/AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile.  The artists receive 11 percent of the revenues.

Twelve percent of the revenues is designated for the charity Keep A Child Alive that distributes AIDs medicine in Africa.  The rest of the revenues goes to overhead; the site owners say they aren't making any money from the project.

Since the project was launched on March 14, several hundred images a day are being downloaded, the Times reports.

Will it succeed?

One artist, Patrick McNeil, views cellular phone "as a new frontier in art."  He notes that most professionals producing urban art already have Web sites, so wallpaper for cellular phones isn't much of a stretch.

McNeil wonders whether there's much of a market for paying for street art since cellular users can photograph images they want to keep.

Yes, that's true.  But even in a major city, such as New York, you don't immediately see the art you want to photograph.  Outside of the major cities, there isn't much street art.  And what if you live overseas?

In other words, I think that even though you can photograph street art, there indeed could be a market for great images.

Huntsville Times publishes article about camera phone applications

The Huntsville Times (Alabama) reports on the good applications for camera phones.  Although it's not any sort of scoop, one application caught my eye.

The article says, "Many women have used this to their advantage. Camera phones are a fun way to take group shots and keep lasting, digital memories, but women can also spot-check their makeup, hair and even what they are wearing.

"'I look terrible. Take that one again,' a woman at Humphrey's once said as she viewed the picture in the camera phone and then instantly adjusted her top."

Small things, but...

Sure, using a camera phone -- instead of a mirror -- isn't an earthshattering application, but it just highlights the value of wireless imaging for everyday uses.

Some people don't strap on wristwatches any more; they use the clock on their cellular phone.  Some people don't carry books -- or as many books -- and instead read eBooks on their PDAs.

It's these "minor" applications -- discovered by consumers who purchase gadgets for one reason and then discover other uses -- that makes wireless imaging such as interesting and valuable technology.

ESS Technology provides camera phone module for Samsung 1.3 megapixel 1xEV-DO handset

ESS Technology is providing its 1.3 megapixel ES2260M camera module for still photos and videos to Samsung Electronics for the A890 cellular phone designed for Verizon Wireless' 1xEV-DO network, ESS' press release says.

ESS says the "integrated image processor provides the flexibility to control exposure, gain, white balance, color saturation, hue, gamma correction, sharpness, and digital zoom, through a simple application programming interface over a standard serial interface.

"The camera module also features real-time JPEG compression to reduce the size of high-resolution images; as a result, the modules are suitable for camera phones originally designed to support the less advanced VGA-resolution camera modules."

Camera phone sensor vendor OmniVision purchases CDM Optics

OmniVision Technologies, a leader in producing CMOS sensors for camera phones, has purchased CDM Optics for $30 million, the press release says.  CDM offers technology "that substantially increases the performance of a camera system by increasing the depth of field and/or correcting optical aberrations of a photographic image, according to the release.

Explaining CDM's technology, tbe press release says, "The technology, known as Wavefront Coding, uses novel optics and innovative algorithms to transform the essential task of focusing a lens from an opto-mechanical process to one of optical encoding and signal processing.

"By merging optics design and digital signal processing, Wavefront Coding can, for example, significantly expand the depth of field of an image, meaning that the image is in focus over a much wider range of distances from the lens than is possible using conventional focusing systems.

"By eliminating motors and actuators, the technology significantly reduces the size and complexity of the auto-focus function on a camera module."

Motley Fool article

A post on the Motley Fool Web site -- the doesn't discuss the CDM purchase -- presents a detailed discussion of OmniVision.  All such posts should be carefully evaluated, but it's interesting reading if you care about the camera phone sensor market.

The post notes, "Camera phones remain the company's bread and butter.  OVTI has deals with 4 of the 5 major phone producers (the lone holdout being Nokia...and there are rumors that Nokia will come on board). 

"The company reportedly sold some 60-70M units last year (various models), for about a 50% share of the market. This year, the total market for camera phones is expected to increase to 200M units, and in 06, the market is expected to increase to 300M units.

"If OVTI maintains a 50% share, the future is amazingly bright."

Negatives

The author, while bullish on OmniVision, also discusses the company's problems, including a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, relatively high inventory, weak forward guidance and the opinion the company is in a commodity business (that the author disputes).

LifePics provides camer phone photo processing for Massachusetts retailers

Twenty three eastern Massachusetts photo processing retailers are using LifePics' technology that enables camera phone users to transmit photos to a Web site that, in turn, enables the photos to be printed and picked up a local retailer, according to an article in the Boston Globe.

LifePics began offering camera phone photo printing capabilities to their photo processing system in February 2005, the company's press release says.

The article is a nice introduction to printing via camera phones, but there's one source quoted that caught my attention.  Here it is:

"Some industry executives are skeptical cellphone prints will ever prove to be any serious rival to prints made from film or high-resolution digital cameras.  'We don't expect this kind of service to prove very popular,' said Carolina Milanesi, a Gartner Inc. analyst.

"Even with the 1.3 megapixel cameras now available, she said, 'the picture quality won't satisfy most people.'"

Oh yeah?

Assuming Milanesi was quoted correctly, she had better spend more time looking at one megapixel (and above) camera phone photos.  Certainly many camera phone in the United States do not produce high quality images and aren't suitable for printing.

But just as certainly there are some VGA and one megapixel camera phones in the U.S. that product images that are just fine for 4" x 6" prints.  And that's based on what's available in the U.S. today.

Two megapixel prints from camera phones available in Japan produce excellent images.  Just ask the consultants at Future Image who have compared camera phone photos with single-use cameras and SLR prints.

The Guardian wonders whether digital cameras are doomed.....Not yet

An article in the the Guardian wonders whether digital cameras are doomed because of advances in camera phones. 

The article leads with, "With Carphone Warehouse claiming to be the biggest camera retailer in Europe, Nokia saying it is the biggest camera manufacturer in the world, and shares in photographic retailer Jessops taking a tumble, some are penning obituaries for the standalone digital camera."

This relatively brief article concludes that the obituaries are premature.  The Guardian says, "Companies such as Canon are banking on the phone evolving to suit different roles (phone plus camera, phone plus music player, phone plus digital TV tuner etc), leaving plenty of space for standalone cameras."

Cellpod: Tripod for camera phones

From an article in ElectronicsWeb I learned about Cellpod, a $24.95 tripod for camera phones from Joy Innovations.  The tripod doesn't attach directly to the phone but, rather, to a cellular phone's "belt clip" case.

The advertising copy says, "That standard button that hooks the phone to your belt snaps directly into the Cellpod.  Many of the leather cases that people purchase to cover their phones have these 'buttons' built in.

"It takes just a few seconds to attach. When you are done there is a quick release. If you don’t use a case or belt clip, an attachable button comes in the box to allow it to work with Cellpod."

Siemens debuts SP65 cellular phone without camera for corporate use

Bowing to pressure from corporations, Siemens has introduced a relatively high end cellular phone that doesn't include a camera.  The GSM tri-band SP65 (see left) includes a MultiMediaCard slot, Bluetooth, supports wireless synchronization with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes and includes advanced PIM functionality.

However, "The absence of the camera supports corporate security policies which prohibit employees to use handsets with cameras," the press release says. 

Siemens says, "The camera functionality has been removed to give business users the perfect handset in harmony with corporate security and procurement policies, yet at the same time equipped with all the necessary functionalities business professionals seek."

Frankly, I think many "business professionals" could make good use of still photo and video capabilities.  Of course, there are corporations with legitimate security concerns where a camera phone -- or any image recording hardware -- wouldn't be appropriate.