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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.

Color, the photo-sharing social app that took the tech industry by storm when it announced $41 million in prelaunch funding shortly after SXSW in March, is almost complete with its pivot. As announced at Facebook's developer conference in September, Color has attached itself to the social network and wants to fundamentally change the notion of the status update. Augmented are the notions of the "elastic" implicit social graph and many vestiges of what Color was when it originally launched.

Color has now launched in private beta around the concept of visual Facebook status updates, called "visits." We explore the new color and its evolution below.

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.

DEMO, the conference where companies get six minutes on stage to present their product, kicked off this morning with VentureBeat's Matt Marshall talking social. "It's all about social," said Marshall, explaining that social media companies like Facebook have grown at an unprecedented pace. It took half a century for IBM to hit $1 billion, whereas it only took Facebook a handful of years, he said.

With that in mind, let's take a look at three companies that presented this morning at DEMO and hope to latch on to the ever-expanding social web.

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.

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.

Any of Facebook's over 400 million users will immediately recognize some new features on popular Twitter photo-sharing service Twitpic today as users can now tag people in their photos. In a blog post this morning, the two-year-old company announced it had passed the 10 million user mark and that it sees 40 million unique visitors each month. The company says it is releasing its Face Tagging functionality "to show [its] thanks" to the community, but could it bring headaches and worries with it too?

Well, that certainly took long enough. Despite being one of the most popular photo-sharing web sites on the net today, Flickr hasn't had an official presence in the iTunes App Store until now. The company has just launched their new iPhone application, available here, which lets you both browse and upload photos and videos from your handset.

Google just made its Picasa Web Albums a lot more social. While you could always share albums with others, you can now also invite other users to contribute photos to an album themselves. Currently, as Google rightly points out, if you go to an event and a number of people take pictures, they will end up on various different photo sharing services afterward. Now, you can just set up one album and everybody can contribute their photos to this one album.

Simplify Media just launched Simplify Photo, a new iPhone and iPod Touch application that allows you to browse all the photos on your computers at home while on the go. Just like with Simplify Music, the appeal of Simplify Photo (iTunes link) is that you don't have to store all of these files on your iPhone, laptop, or netbook, where storage space is often an issue. Instead, Simplify Media's desktop application just turns your Mac or PC into a media server and you access your music and photos remotely. Simplify Photo is currently on sale in the App Store for $0.99.