also see: http://www.mobileasses.com/ --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/start.html?pg=2 Issue 11.07 - July 2003 Phonecam Nation Everyone's posting instant photos on the Web. Get ready for your close-up. By Xeni Jardin Whipping out a cheap phonecam at the height of a late-night bash, a Michigan frat boy snaps his own Girls Gone Wild shots and instantly uploads them to an online gallery accessible by anyone in the world. At a Los Angeles convenience store, a woman witnesses a holdup - and with the press of a button, she captures the thief's image and zaps it to 911. In Hong Kong, a mobile phone user photographs the apartment complex of a neighbor suspected of carrying SARS. He posts the pictures, details, and GPS coordinates to an unofficial database designed to do what the government won't: collect and provide data about the spread of the virus. The trend started innocuously a few years ago, when novelty cameras that plugged into mobile handsets were marketed to gadget-obsessed kids in Japan and Europe. But in the past few months, a global phonecam revolution has begun to emerge. Take the device's portability, add its ability to post images online, multiply by its growing ubiquity, and what do you get? A cheap, fast strain of DIY publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts. As phonecams proliferate - more than 13 million were sold in Japan in 2002, and US buyers will snap up 2 million this year - you'll never know when someone out there might snap your photo, then upload it for the world to see. The cams will instantly capture and disseminate scenes of crimes in progress or police brutality as it happens (think Rodney King or Lizzie Grubman slamming into her four-wheeled prey). Like TV's addictive, blurry-jerky live videophone footage from Mideast war zones, device portability makes up for image quality. As the mobile imaging hordes colonize the globe, they'll capture and send news of natural disasters or political upheavals before conventional media can react. (London war protesters did just that last winter, uploading images to a site created by the BBC.) And the news and gossip feed will be cross-platform: Minutes after a story breaks, television and Web sources will gather phonecam shots from the scene and disseminate them to viewers. The world will be one big reality show. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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