Nokia is Getting Serious!

Nokia's Christian Lindholm provides a link to a webcast of Nokia's Destination Multimedia event. This is very worthwhile watching if you are interested in mobile photography. These new NSeries phones look amazing for shutterbugs. Carl Zeiss lenses (an exclusive deal for mobile), higher resolution and interesting on-camera capabilities and they are shipping Adobe Photoshop Album with the phones which is a big coup for Adobe!

Speaking today at Destination Multimedia: "

Destination Multimedia will be a very interesting event for Nokia. Nokia will showcase some very interesting stuff and new directions for the company. I urge you to go and look at the web casts here. I will try to report...

"

Flickr Memory Maps - Now this is Cool

Flickr: The Memory Maps Pool

If you have been following this blog at all you know I'm a big fan of connecting pictures with maps (geo-coding) and of FotoNotes, now there's a group on Flickr combining the two to generate "memory maps". These are satellite photos that are screen grabbed from Google Maps, typically of the neighborhood where a Flickr member grew up that are then annotated using fotonotes. This is absolutely cool in so many different ways. Some of the notes are great, where your best friend lived, where you hung out, where the girl (or boy) you had a crush on lived, where you went to school, where you................... etc. It is amazing how much insight you can gain about somebody you don't even know just by taking a look at a memory map.

It would be great of you could hyperlink from the notes to another group of pictures of the house or the friend, etc. This is better than drugs................ what is it that compells us to view annotated maps of people we don't even know? Curiosity, entertainment, voyerism?

Nikon Does Face Detection in Camera

Nikon Imaging | Global Site | News

Digital cameras are becoming more and more like portable computers as an increasing number of functions are being done in the devicess. Nikon was among the first to do in-camera red-eye reduction/removal (not just the annoying multiple flash approach) and now they have introduced a feature called Face-priority AF (Autofocus). Once again they have done it to me. My CoolPix 5200 is for sale on EBay and I'm in line for an S-1 with this new feature.

The next step will be to not only detect the face for autofocus but to actually recognize the face for automatic tagging. Recognition is a quantum leap from detection from a computational standpoint but it could be done over a wireless connection (the analysis of a particlular face gets done in the camera but gets matched to a recognizer sitting in the network).

Wouldn't it be sooooo nice to have the people you typically take pictures of be automatically recognized and the file would be tagged with the appropriate metadata! I've done this manually in both Photoshop Album and Picasa and it can be tedious.

HeyPix! Acquired by CNET

HeyPix! The best way to share photos.

Congratulations James & Eric! Windup Labs, the developers of HeyPix announced today that they have been acquired by CNET. Though this is too close in time to be a direct response to Yahoo's Flickr purchase it shows that building communities with photos is something that has the online media companies very interested. They HeyPix guys originally started with a P2P service called Electric Shoebox so CNET is picking up a talented team and some great softeware assets.

I hate to see such great talent moving off to CA but that is where the action is. Good luck guys!