More Photos
This is some more info about the mobile photos Mobile Monday event last night. Chris Dury from ScanR presented an information capture application, much different than the previous two presentations which focused mostly on the social aspects. The application focuses on using cameraphones as scanners for capturing whiteboard content and printed information. Cool idea. I’ve used my cameraphone to snap pics of whiteboards for sharing quite a few times. Their software helps clean up common problems with the images like blurring from movement while taking the picture and reflection from the flash. The image can be sent to multiple recipients and trasferred to a fax machine. You can sign up for a free trial account on their site. I’ll have to give it a try next time I swap my SIM back into my 6680. It reminded me a lot of the “cameraphone as network enabled image sensor” ideas that were floating around a year or two ago. Most of that discussion has skewed toward the social side, but this seems like a nice practical application I bet would appeal to a bunch of people.
Rich Gossweiller from HP Labs showed off PLOG. The idea behind PLOG was making it simple to share a story using a cameraphone as the authoring device. It covers not only the creation of the story, but dealing with multiple display points when viewing the story (PC, digital picture frame, another mobile device). The creator of the story uses a very simple interface on the phone. It intercepts the incoming image and asks if you want to upload it, and then it’s just one click to say yes or no. It transparently captures geolocation info to upload with the image so that the image can be presented on a map. The images are stored on the server and the author of the story can come back and annotate them as necessary. The story can then be distributed via RSS to others sitting at a PC or using a digital picture frame or using another mobile device. The reader of the story can choose to further share, which can mean either fowarding along the digital story or printing out a hardcopy to send or show. Rich is actually leaving HP Labs soon and is looking for what to do next.
Mike Prynce showed off a demo of Mobido, a photosharing app focused on capturing and persisting a community. The demo he showed was creating an email address (momo@mobido.com) and allowing people to join up by sending an MMS message with a picture to that address. The members of that group, the people who send the email, can then find each other through that group and keep in contact. The communication stays abstracted throught the Mobido service, so you never have to give up your contact info if you don’t want to. I’ve signed up for it and played around some. I’m miker on the system, send me a message if you sign up.
