First it was smartphones integrating cameras. Could we be about to see the inverse - cameras integrating smartphone technology? That's the concept being explored by Seattle design company Artefact. They've come up with an intriguing prototype for a camera that incorporates smartphone technology - a.k.a. a SmartCam. Artefact claims that innovation has stalled in the camera industry, that there hasn't been much new in camera devices over the past 10 years. They're aiming to shake up the camera industry and are already talking to camera companies (and others) about implementing their vision. I spoke to Artefact's founders to learn more.
This is the fifth post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming - and producing - media is changing with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. So far we've looked at music on smartphones, news apps on the iPad, RSS Readers on smartphones and online radio in cars.
Last night, an app called Color hit the app stores for both iOS and Android. It made a big splash for a number of reasons, not the least of which being its $41 million prelaunch funding. It has all-star founders who have a impressive track records. It launched days after, instead of before, uber tech conference SXSW. Unfortunately for the company, the app can offer a terrible experience for first-time users and appear absolutely useless to those outside of a densely packed, techie mecca like San Francisco or New York.
Let's put all that aside for a moment, however, and look at how Color works, what it does, and why it could redefine mobile, location, and online social interaction. We took some time to talk with Color CEO Bill Nguyen this afternoon and asked him about the tech behind the most talked about app this side of SXSW and here's what he had to say.
Instagram, eat your heart out! PhotoJojo's 8X external telephoto lens for the iPhone sells for a mere $35! Of course the iPhone 4 version is sold out right now but it looks like more will ship out early next month.
Found via the always fabulous blog PSFK, where we read about the Gramophone-Shaped Analog Speaker For The iPhone last week (see below). What's next, external sin detection devices?
Scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a method for creating 3D models of pretty much anything in pretty much no time.
Using a sexy algorithm and the millions of photographs available from Flickr, the team can create a sophisticated three-dimensional model on a single personal computer in under a day.
When we look at a city in terms of a map, the map we most often use, whether paper or online, is a street map. Street maps tend to divide things according to political considerations. The city itself, the county it's in, maybe the neighborhood or borough. Streets change in character and function but most maps fail to express that change.
But now, using Flickr and OpenStreetMap, Eric Fischer has created a series of maps that look at cities in a much different way. According to race and ethnicity.
TweetPhoto is the kind of service you probably interact with every week, without even realizing it, if you don't actually use it yourself. The social photo-sharing platform is integrated into 250 third-party applications, including Seesmic, TweetDeck, Echofon and others. While media darling Foursquare makes headlines for reaching 3 million active users, TweetPhoto sees over 25 million uniques monthly, all who generally arrive after clicking links shared on Twitter or Facebook. But TweetPhoto had a problem - its name no longer explained what it actually was. It does more than "tweet photos" - a lot more, in fact, as of today.
NASA today joined the Commons on Flickr. Thanks to this, NASA will now begin to share a large variety of pictures from its vast collection of images on Flickr. Currently, three image collections ("Launch and Takeoff," "Building NASA" and "Center Namesakes") are available on Flickr. All of these images are published without any copyright restrictions.
In collaboration with the Internet Archive, NASA already makes thousands of images and thousands of hours of video available on NASAimages.org. There, however, users can't comment on pictures.
Polar Rose, a Swedish-based facial recognition startup launched in summer 2007, is shutting down its consumer-facing service that allowed users to tag people in photos anywhere on the Web. Last spring, the innovative company introduced facial recognition to popular photo-sharing site Flickr by way of a third-party browser plugin. With the plugin installed, Polar Rose users could tag their Flickr photos with the names of their Facebook contacts and then alert those friends on Facebook that they had been tagged. It also organized Flickr photos into pages by person and could recognize people automatically in later uploads.
Unfortunately, this and all other end user-focused services are being terminated as the company switches its focus to its series of facial recognition products. Says Polar Rose's Thijs Stalenhoef, the service was "fun while it lasted."
Last month, social photo-sharing site Flickr finally added some long-awaited Facebook integration to its service, allowing users to simultaneously post photos on both Flickr and Facebook with one upload. But there was a small problem with the way that the new feature was set up: it basically spammed your Facebook Wall with post after post about your new photos.
Today, that problem has been fixed, reports Flickr.
In March, Google acquired the online photo editing service Picnik and today, the company is integrating Picnik with Picasa Web Albums, Google's online photo sharing service. Picnik, which allows users to perform basic photo editing functions and add stickers and text to images will retain its own branding and web presence, but Picasa users will now find an "Edit in Picnik" button as one of the options in the online version of Picasa.
