Cognima Snap: Smarter Camera Phones
Amy Jo Kim mentions a new technology that is designed to ease the "pain" of dealing with those, now tiny, pictures the new breed of camera phones are snapping around the world.
For camera phone owners, one of the greatest hassles of the process is actually getting the picture off of the phone once a picture has been taken. There are a few reasons that moving pictures is important (at least for now):
Contagion - For the most part, people are snapping pictures "in the now" and want to spread that moment to as wide an audience as possible (usually the members of the clan that aren't physically participating).
Storage - Currently, the small devices are not equipped with enough memory. This makes it impossible to store a large amount of photos on the device at any one time. Couple this with the photos already attached to contacts in the address book and the available space is even smaller.
To further aggravate matters, there are a couple of strong forces that are working to prevent users from actually getting their photos off:
Interface Design - As with most electronic devices, there are a number of features that are present, but often not used. With camera phones, usually a button is dedicated to the camera. However, there are still issues in terms of how to manipulate that image, how to annotate it, etc. that prevent many users from having the picture the way they want it.
Infrastructure Design - Making phone calls is a relatively painless process on your average camera phone. Sending pictures is a different story. In many respects, it requires a bit of knowledge outside of the device to tell how to send a picture (e-mail vs. MMS, for example) . In addition, there's a potential looming question if the image ever made it to its destination.
In Europe, where SMS is far more entrenched, these may be "easier" tasks. We're only barely getting used to it here in the States now.
Enter Cognima. They've developed a new technology that will allow for the automatic publishing of photo content to a central server. The process happens behind the scenes and is, in essence, painless. According to a study they conducted, it works:
Cognima's study showed that normal camera phone users end up not being particularly active MMS users. Only 18% of the regular MMS users they followed kept on taking and sending pictures on a regular basis two weeks after the trial began. However, 70% of customers using Cognima were still happily snapping photos.
Source: TheFeature, "Taking The Upload Out Of The Camera Phone Process"