Phone-camera users post on Web in a snap
By A.S. Berman
Gannett News Service
When Philippe Kahn's daughter, Sophie, came into the world in 1997, she brought with her the inspiration for new technology.
Frustrated by his inability to instantly share digital pictures of the event, Kahn set out to design a technology that would allow people to take a digital picture with their cell phone and send it to the Internet or another wireless phone instantly.
The following year, he and wife Sonia Lee founded Lightsurf, which licensed that technology to wireless phone service giant Sprint PCS, and let the phonecam genie out of the bottle.
Millions of people have spent between $100 and $400 for a camera phone and $3 to $15 a month for "picture messaging" services that use Kahn's technology, and are peppering the Web with millions of images from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
The TextAmerica Web site (www.textamerica.com) allows camera-phone users to post images and captions on their own personal "moblogs," or photo collections, for free once they've registered. In that time, the site has gone from receiving a few images a day to between 75 and 100 daily.
"Camera phones are getting people who wouldn't normally take photographs to take them," says Chris Hoar, vice president of marketing for the San Diego company.
Though many moblogs consist of random photos, Hoar says the more popular ones tend to carry a theme, such as the "CoffeeGeek's Mobile Phone Blog" (http://coffeegeek.textamerica.com), which features a number of images relating to the caffeinated elixir.
"And then there's this gentleman who spends a lot of time in the gas lamp district (of San Diego) and takes pictures of the party scene," Hoar says.
A quick tour of that moblog (http://echo.textamerica.com) and its images of festive, mildly exhibitionist bar hoppers leads one to wonder just how candid these phonecam images can get.
"It's been a very minor problem," Hoar says, adding that only a couple of users have been barred from the site for posting inappropriate photos. "I was concerned it would become a pornography meeting place, but it hasn't."
You are there
While the Chinese government was downplaying the incidence of SARS within its borders earlier this year, the Phlog Web site (www.phlog.net) was posting phonecam images snapped on the streets of Beijing.
"A group of guys ... were riding motorbikes across the country right when SARS broke," says site creator Alan Bradburne, 29, of Reading, England. "It's amazing to see candid photographs of how people's lives were affected."
Bradburne, a system test engineer, says he launched the Phlog site in January, shortly after getting a Nokia 3650 camera phone of his own.
"The real beauty of camera cell phones," Bradburne says, "is that they are always with you. I love photography, but never seem to have my camera with me at that perfect moment. With a camera phone, the photos may not be of the highest quality but it doesn't really matter as the spontaneity and subject matter shine through."
Phlog currently boasts more than 400 registered users from all over the world. Registration is free.
Worth a thousand words
Some see camera phone Web sites as the obvious successors to the text-based weblogs, or blogs, that have mushroomed so dramatically in the past couple of years.
"The thing that's so powerful about photographs as opposed to words is how immediate they are," says Adam Seifer, 35, of Fotolog (www.fotolog.net). "A typical blog has lots of words. It's difficult to scan a blog and get a sense of (whether) it's worth reading. With a photo, you know right away if it's something you like and something you want to see more of."
Fotolog users can post one photo a day for free, or six per day if they pay a $5 monthly fee.
One user created an area on the site called "phonecam" (www.fotolog.net/phonecam) where camera-phone owners are invited to post a random snapshot.
Though camera-phone owners account for a very small percentage of Fotolog's nearly 17,000 users, Seifer says there's definitely something to be said for a type of camera that people always carry with them, especially during historic events.
"A few months ago, when a lot of peace rallies were going on around the world, there were a lot of interesting phonecam pictures," Seifer says. "It was real real-time reporting."
