The real reason I was in Maui last week was to attend the first ever Cameraphone Summit hosted by my pal Moses Ma. Official site and info can be found here:
Cameraphone Summit Website
Cameraphone Summit Realtime Website
Heather's uploaded pictures from the cameraphone
I met a bunch of really interesting people and companies. I'll mention the ones that struck my fancy below.
Fotonotes - sounds interesting. Ability to add annotations to photos - because photos have stories. I'm going to check this company out more because the demo I saw was very cool.
Flickr - I'm not exactly sure what this site is all about. It's a flash application that runs to upload your photos and basically create a group online with a bunch of other functionality like IM.
GoPix - You can send electric greetings via email - why not send them to and from your phone. GoPix puts together greetings (your photo from the cameraphone) and voice recording, plus a border or theme and send it to an email or another phone. Cool!
Yafro Games - from the guys at Hot or Not, imagine mobile camera games.
Adobe - Adobe had an interesting xmp structure that is like an xml data structure attached to jpgs for various searching functions. Currently you can only use it with Adobe products, but image if Google picked this up for searching functionality. In the xmp data sidecar you can put various information and maybe even trademark, copyright and ownership information. It would make it easier to search and use photos posted to the web as long as the sidecar was kept with the image datafile.
Don Norman from the Norman Neilson Group (Jakob Neilson - the usability guru) spoke on cameraphones and had some really interesting things to say. Simplicity is naive. This caught me because you hear so much in software companies to keep is simple (KISS - Keep it simple, stupid!). We are complicated people - keeping it simple, keeps it from doing many functions. If you are building a product that does a lot of things build a cognitive map - a detailed user scenario / use case - to really focus on how people are going to use the product.
BlueLava - games on phones.
SnapNPost - I wanted to talk to these guys more because they had some interesting ideas. Another site that posts cameraphone photos to the web.
StoryManager - This sounds like a great little company. It's basically your business and marketing department distilled down to an application. LOTS of sole props can really benefit from what I saw. Talk to Steve Sue. VERY COOL!!!
Elliot Maxwell, Mark Resch and Greg from fotonotes and I had an interesting conversation about the impact of technology on kids today and social interactions. I don't have any answers, I have opinions and I'm going to continue to watch to see how we as human primate d/evolve. ;)
Of course I also had my multiple cents about multiple identities and how people use them and how technology and the do NOT facilitate managing the various technology personalities and levels of intimacy. FOAF is a baby step towards the technology levels of importance with other people's technology identities. Plaxo is also a baby step. We'll have to see what Google does with Gmail and Orkut and their upcoming IPO.
Maybe I'll have to start a company that deals with the identity issue. AIM took the first step by launching my Screen Name Linking feature, but it is a mere baby step and I bet AOL is not planning to do much more on that feature. Too bad that company owns the patent (with my name on it) instead of me personally owning it. Ah, the delights of working for a HUGE organization.
Product Development Alert!
I'd like to see a photo or blog company make it easy to make a physical product based from my content. Ofoto and Shutterfly do this with digital photos that are uploaded. You can even create a photo album that will be sent to you all bound and everything. You can add captions and make it a gift for someone. So why not do this with blog entries?
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