Facebook hired the developers of Lightbox, an Android-focused social imaging platform.
While the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, the social network is not actually acquiring the service, it’s site, or its user base. Existing members can use Lightbox.com until June 15, when the UK-based service shuts down.
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Nokia says its City Lens augmented reality app for Windows Phone “instantly connects you to all of the places you’re looking for, and gets you there exactly when and how you want to.”
On the phone’s camera display, City Lens will show what’s nearby “the way that works best for you: whether through a camera view, list view, or maps view—including landmarks, restaurants, hotels, shops and more,” the company adds.
The app is free from Nokia’s Beta Labs, and runs on Nokia’s Lumia 710, 800, 900 Windows Phones.
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Billing itself as an “online marketplace for buying and selling Instagram photos as canvas art pieces,” start-up Instacanvas “connect artists with buyers worldwide.”
Photos are printed on stretched canvas. Photographers can set up a free online gallery “in just a few clicks,” Instacanvas says, and use “a social toolset that allows photographers to transform their social networks into powerful distribution channels.”
Prices start at $40 for 12-by-12 inch framed print. Instacanvas passes on to artists 20 percent of the sale price for each item sold. “We handle the printing, boxing, and shipping, so all you have to worry about is taking more awesome photos.”
The site says it takes photos directly from Instagram, at the standard 612 by 612 pixel resolution. “They look fantastic on canvas, due to our print sizing technology.”
The company says millions of Internet users enjoy beautiful photography online across various social networks, “but until now there wasn’t an easy way to buy and display the art they love offline.”
Instacanvas claims to “already power over 25,000 galleries for photographers in 30 countries.”
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Online photo provider Getty Images is offering a free multimedia research report on visual trends: “The Curve: Technology and Telecommunications.”
“Getty Images is constantly innovating, experimenting with new formats to showcase the power of digital media,” the company says, “and with this edition of The Curve, we chronicle the evolution of photography through technology and how we use imagery to connect with one another with a sleek, redesigned site that features video, imagery and commentary.”
The research into visual communication “unearthed a number of emerging industry trends that highlight how the merging of media and technology are democratizing content and encouraging connectivity through shared visual experiences,” Getty adds. “This research is supported by case studies and commentary from leading industry influencers.”
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Online photo service Shutterfly officially welcomed Kodak Gallery members — after it acquired Kodak’s online service and customers… and their images.
“Working together with Kodak Gallery over the coming months, Shutterfly will securely transfer every Kodak Gallery customer photo, more than five billion in total, to the Shutterfly platform, free of charge,” the company says. “We promise to make the transfer process very easy for customers and will communicate our progress every step of the way.”
Kodak Gallery customers have until May 28 to choose to opt out of moving their photos to Shutterfly.
The two competing services started on the same day in 1989. The Imaging Resource has a good historical look here.
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Athentech Imaging says its “lab-quality corrections make sure your photos are perfect… with just one click! You can also fine-tune your images to get that great look you want.”
The app applies patented corrections the company developed over 10 years, it says, to automatically deliver “a beautiful photo you can’t wait to share.”
Version 2.4 of Perfectly Clear supports the full 8 megapixel resolution of the iPhone 4S, while delivering faster processing times, and better preserving EXIF data, including geotags.
Also in the update: optimized preview for faster loading, 100 percent speedier corrections, and improved share abilities with Facebook and Twitter.
Perfectly Clear for iPhone, normally $2.99, is on sale this week for $0.99. The iPad version is $1.99, down from $5.99.
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Verizon Wireless says its customers will be able to “share live video broadcasts of life’s special moments with their Facebook friends” using a free camera app from mobile imaging developer Color.
Highlighting “the power of video on Verizon Wireless’ 4G LTE network,” the Color app gives smartphone customers “the ability to broadcast up to 30 seconds of live video and share the important moments in their daily lives at blazing speeds,” Verizon says.
The Color app also batch uploads photos to Facebook, “an easy and fast way to share multiple photos from a phone’s camera roll to any Facebook album,” the firms say.
On a blog post, Color founder Bill Nguyen expounded on the benefits of live video, saying “there’s something special about live. It’s spontaneous. You never know what to expect so you watch in anticipation.” But with the Facebook app Color offered last December, “the current cell networks and smartphones forced us to make some significant compromises. We settled for low quality video and left out audio, so we could broadcast live. Our other option was to enable recorded video and then upload, but that’s not live.”
With Verizon’s 4G network, Color adds audio, and doubled the frame rate on its live video “so our friends and family can see more moments more clearly.”
In the future, Nguyen adds, “you will be able to capture every moment and share it live in beautiful HD quality, and you’ll have the recorded video to keep. From that video, you’ll be able to pick out the exact frames you want share as photos.”
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Though they may possess identical image-resolution capabilities, today’s camera phones produce vastly different quality images. Vendors and consumers lack sufficient standardized metrics to compare one handset to the next. To enable consumers to more easily and accurately compare and choose camera phones — and to ultimately enjoy a better user experience — the largest technical professional association, IEEE, says it will “spearhead the global industry effort to evolve camera-phone image quality.”
The new IEEE P1858 Draft Standard for Camera Phone Image Quality development project takes over the I3A initiative to specify methods and metrics for measuring and testing camera-phone image quality.
The International Imaging Industry Association’s efforts will make “a strategic addition to the IEEE Standards Association suite of mobile-video standards designed to improve the customer experience,” IEEE says. The new IEEE effort “involves many of the same corporate members that contributed to I3A’s five-year-old groundbreaking activity.”
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Samsung Electronics says its third-generation Galaxy S III “recognizes how you are using your phone by having the 2-megapixel front camera identify your eyes” to register when you’re looking at the phone, and, for example, keep the screen lit while you’re reading.
The phone also features new social imaging features such as the “Buddy” function which shares photos simultaneously “with all your friends pictured in an image, directly from the camera or the photo gallery.”
The main 8-megapixel camera features zero-lag shutter speed, which “lets you capture moving objects easily without delay – the image you see is the picture you take,” the company says. Also, the burst function captures twenty continuous shots, and the “Best photo” feature selects the best of eight photographs, to “ensure a more enhanced and memorable camera experience.”
Both front and rear cameras capture HD video.
The phone runs the Android OS on a quad-core processor, and has a 4.8-inch display.
The Galaxy S III will be available in May in Europe, before rolling out to other markets globally.
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Nokia announced it will soon ship its 808 PureView camera phone… to Russia and India.
The 808 combines a 41 megapixel sensor with new pixel oversampling technology and Carl Zeiss optics. At 5–8 megapixel resolutions, it can zoom without loss of clarity, the company says. At 38 megapixels maximum resolution, it provides “the ability to capture an image, then zoom, reframe, crop and resize afterwards to expose previously unseen levels of details.”
The new phone uses the company’s old Symbian operating system instead of the Windows Phone OS from Microsoft that Nokia has already announced it will standardize on for its primary smartphone platform.
A Windows-based model with PureView is expected in the U.S. sometime this year.
“PureView represents Nokia’s highest level smartphone imaging experiences, bringing together high-performance sensors, exclusive Carl Zeiss optics, and Nokia developed imaging algorithms,” the Finland company says. “PureView has completely raised the bar on imaging performance for the whole smartphone industry. We’re going to carry on developing PureView for our future smartphones in ways that will again revolutionize the imaging experience.”
Also, Nokia and lens-maker Carl Zeiss announced their partnership has been extended. “Looking back at seven years of successful partnership, we are proud of the innovations and outstanding products created in this shared journey,” Zeiss says.
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Saying it will protect its innovations and intellectual property, Nokia is commencing patent litigation in the U.S. and Germany against U.S.-based Viewsonic, HTC of Taiwan, and Research in Motion of Canada.
The company says it already licenses the 45 patents in question to more than 40 companies. “Though we’d prefer to avoid litigation, Nokia had to file these actions to end the unauthorized use of our proprietary innovations and technologies.”
Nokia’s actions include a complaint to the US International Trade Commission (ITC) against HTC; suits against HTC and Viewsonic in the Federal District Court of Delaware, US; against HTC and RIM in the Regional Court in Dusseldorf, Germany; and against all three companies in the Regional Courts in Mannheim and Munich, Germany.
Nokia says the patents cover dual function antennas, power management and multimode radios, application stores, multitasking, navigation, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption, and retrieval of email attachments on a mobile device.
Nokia posted a $1.2 billion net loss for first quarter of 2012.
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Samsung captured 25 percent of the mobile phone market, making its “the world’s number one handset vendor for the first time ever,” reports research firm Strategy Analytics.
Samsung shipped 93.5 million handsets worldwide. Global handset shipments grew a modest 3 percent annually to reach 368 million units in the first quarter of 2012, the company adds. Nokia’s global handset shipments declined a 24 percent annually to 82.7 million units in Q1 2012.
Apple shipped 35.1 million handsets worldwide in Q1 2012, nearly doubling from 18.6 million units in Q1 2011. “Apple achieved its highest ever market share in the overall handset category, capturing 10 percent of global shipments during the first quarter of 2012,” Strategy Analytics says.
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Online storage provider Dropbox improved on the photo and video features it introduced in February with an automatic uploading function that copies images to its cloud whenever a camera, phone, or other device is connected to a host PC.
“Now Dropbox can automatically upload from just about any camera, tablet, SD card or smartphone — pretty much anything that takes photos or videos,” the company says. “Plus, you can view your uploaded pictures on the web from our new Photos page.”
The company says getting pictures off your camera “has always been a huge pain.” With its Mac or Windows software, “you can just plug your camera, phone, or SD card into your computer, and with a few clicks of the mouse all your photos and videos are in your Dropbox.” Photos are uploaded “in full-quality and at their original size.”
The Photos web page shows the images with large thumbnails, grouped by month. You can hover over each to find the date, or click to see them full-size and then download or share them with a link, Dropbox adds.
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A new iPhone app promises unprecedented control and unparalleled image quality: 645 Pro “feels like a pro camera — because it is one,” the developer claims.
It doesn’t quite serve up a real, fresh-from-the-sensor Raw file like that made in an SLR. Instead it yields a “developed TIFF,” one that has no JPEG compression, and so, potentially greater image quality that any other phone photography app.
“645 PRO takes a different approach,” the developer Jag.gr says. “It gets its image data at an earlier phase of Apple’s “development process,” before any JPEG compression has been applied. …It’s completely new (as far as we know).”
The app also works less like software and more like a camera: “645 PRO has been designed, from the ground up, for professional and serious amateur photographers. So it works the way a camera works, not some piece of computer software,” says Jag.gr founder Mike Hardaker. “Every setting is managed directly from the camera — no layers of menus to negotiate. You have instant access to everything that can be controlled, from focus/exposure and white balance locking to a choice between spot and multi-zone metering.”
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Google’s StreetView maps now offer 3D photo tours of famous landmarks — tours made with user-supplied photos.
To produce the photo tours, Google says it used computer vision techniques “to create a 3D experience from public, user-contributed Picasa and Panaromio photos. We start by finding clusters of overlapping photos around major landmarks. From the photos, our system derives the 3D shape of each landmark and computes the location and orientation of each photo. Google Maps then selects a path through the best images, and adds 3D transitions to seamlessly guide you from photo to photo as if you’re literally flying around the landmark and viewing it from different perspectives.”
The new technique can beat being there, the company adds — or at least, beat your own vacation photos. “Every year, millions of people pack their bags and head to far-off places to enjoy sites and cultures different from their own,” Google says. “While there, they snap photos to document their trip and share their excursions online. Yet none of these individual photos captures the experience of actually being immersed in a specific location.”
While photos used are designated “public” by their contributors, “every photo is attributed to its contributor,” Google says, “and the more photos people share, the better the tours get.”
[You must enable WebGL in your web browser for the tours to work.]
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Instead of keeping text messaging, photo sharing and other communication features separate, Cooliris says its completely redesigned LiveShare is “a paradigm shift in mobile communication” that “seamlessly combines them into a visually exciting experience across mobile and web.” The free app makes “the communication experience truly dynamic,” the company adds, and “blends free text messaging, photo sharing, and location check-ins… for groups and one-on-one conversations.”
LiveShare presents text, photos, and maps unlike any other messaging app, Cooliris adds. “Photos are interweaved as beautiful collages within text conversations, not just displayed as individual thumbnails.”
The app also features a multi- shot camera mode that “captures the action as it happens… and immediately uploads the burst of photos into a collage.”
Users can message anyone else with LiveShare — or to any email address or phone number. Replies come back to the app. LiveShare is free in the iTunes App Store.
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Kodak says that with its improved Gallery app, you can “order prints using the one thing you always carry with you: your iPhone” for same-day pickup at a CVS or Target stores.
The Gallery app lets users upload, share and collect photos with friends in a group album. “Ever been to a party or taken a trip where a bunch of friends took pictures that you never saw?” Kodak asks. “Problem solved — just start a Group Album, invite your friends to add their photos and voila! Everyone’s photos are in one place. “ The app can also share images by email, text, Facebook, or hundreds of other social networks.
Version 3 is free at the App Store.
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Adobe updated its Revel cloud-based photo sync service: version 1.2 adds support for the Retina Display on the new iPad, and faster image editing on the iPad and iPhone.
Also new are the ability to tag photos with an event name “so that a photo library matches how things happened in real life,” the company says, a grid view which displays photos from a single day or event, and the ability to share, export and delete multiple photos at once,
“Revel is the best way to keep all your photos synced across your different devices,” Adobe says. “All the photos you put in Revel are automatically and effortlessly accessible on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Revel is also a lot of fun to experience with others. Share a carousel with your friends so everyone has a single place to put all the photos from your group events. Everyone uploads to the same photo carousel, and you can instantly see what others are capturing from your personal device.” As carousels can be private, “Revel is perfect for couples who want a single place for both of their photos,” Adobe adds.
The app, first called Carousel, includes editing tools and sliders that control lighting, color and clarity. And, like Instagram and other imaging apps, Revel can add filters, here called “Looks,” to turn a photo black and white, “add a soft dream like look or another filter to give your friends vintage sepia flare.”
Subscription pricing for an Adobe Revel account is $6 per month.
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The Cloud Photos photography app for the iPhone will, as the name implies, capture, control and share photos in the cloud.
The $2 app also provides image and album management functions, and shares shots over social networks or privately — making it a lot easier to automatically post pictures everywhere as they are captured than is possible with iOS’ built-in photo tools.
Cloud Photos uses the Dropbox service for storage to sync and store photos, “freeing your mobile photos from your phone,” developer Syrp says. It also saves storage space on the iPhone: Cloud Photos only saves a thumbnail version of photos on the iPhone, developer Syrp says, “saving you 40X the space of the original photos. This gives you more space for apps and media, while making your photo library available online or offline. The original files are available to be downloaded at anytime to share.”
When new photos are automatically synced and uploaded to Dropbox, you’ll “never worry about losing mobile photos again,” Syrp adds. Photos synced with Dropbox appear in your Photos folder, so you have access to them from anywhere. Users set whether uploading occurs over WiFi or 3G.
Cloud Photos’ camera tool offers white balance, focus, exposure and grid controls.
Syrp Inc., is self-described as “two brothers in a basement in Toronto, Ontario, Canada making sticky sweet applications.”
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Canadian photo sharing site 500px is now offering an affordable service for enthusiasts.
Previously, the site only offered the basic free service, or $50/year “Awesome” accounts which provided professionals with “stylish easy-to-build portfolios, unlimited uploads, custom domain support and more.” Now, the company says, “you can have more than just the basics, without upgrading to Awesome; that’s where Plus comes in.”
Plus provides unlimited uploads and storage, and two new features: Sets to group and share photos in themed albums, with buttons to connect to social media, and tools for slideshows. And Statistics, which give “insight into what’s happening with your photos. See the number of likes and dislikes, faves and comments over a time period you choose.”
The Plus account is $20 a year.
A few pundits see the move as a direct challenge to Flickr, Yahoo’s somewhat static service that has seen some online criticism of late. Flickr’s similar Pro account is $25.
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Autodesk will provide its Pixlr photo editing tools to Photobucket users, enabling per-pixel editing as well as simple tools to correct, crop, resize and personalize images with effects, overlays and borders.
The companies say the partnership “will also provide advertisers with a creative environment from which they can deliver custom, branded effects in Photobucket ad packages” before the services’ 100 million users.
Autodesk says Pixlr has more than 25 million users and is one of the most widely used free photo editors. “It transforms any image with a fast, intuitive and robust toolset that is easy to use for inexperienced photographers with no prior knowledge of photo editing, while also offering fully featured, per-pixel editing complete with layers, adjustment tools and filters for the more advanced user.”
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The world’s largest social network will acquire the hot new imaging network for $1 billion in cash and stock options.
“The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter,” Facebook says.
Instagram is a mobile image sharing platform that grew to 30 million users in just 15 months on Apple’s iPhone, and which last week added an Android version of its app — and saw an immediate leap of millions of more new members.
“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family,” says Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post on the acquisition. “Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests. We believe these are different experiences that complement each other.”
Instagram and CEO Kevin Systrom says he and co-founder Krieger started Instagram “to change and improve the way the world communicates and shares. We’ve had an amazing time watching Instagram grow into a vibrant community of people from all around the globe… Every day that passes, we see more experiences being shared through Instagram in ways that we never thought possible.”
Zuckerberg also notes the rareness of the transaction: “This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users,” he says. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.”
However, Zuckerberg says Instagram will remain an independent service, and keep its connections to competing platforms. “Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it,” he says, “and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people… We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook. …We need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.”
“It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away,” Systrom confirms. “We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience. The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love. You’ll still have all the same people you follow and that follow you. You’ll still be able to share to other social networks. And you’ll still have all the other features that make the app so fun and unique.”
Our take: The social power of photo sharing has long been a key aspect of Facebook’s huge growth and success — but the company was not getting the traction in mobile imaging that it had long established on the desktop. Instagram was proving that a new, simpler way of enhancing and sharing photos on the phone could quickly catch fire.
Facebook has long been rumored to be developing improved mobile imaging apps. Perhaps it proved simpler to buy a tried-and-tested tool instead of work in-house. But in our opinion, with this purchase Facebook is primarily heading off a possible social networking competitor, as Instagram’s actual features and technology are likely not anything FB couldn’t have developed itself.
Also important: what significant percentage of Instagram’s users were not already FB members? (Yes, yes, Instagram had much more *active* users perhaps…)
Nonetheless, our congratulations to the Instagram team for a widely-admired imaging service, and now, for billion-dollar financial reward for the work.
New research from 6Sight finds that, for taking, enhancing and sharing photos, smartphones and tablets complement rather than replace digital cameras and personal computers.
Today’s “connected generation of photo takers” shoot, enhance and share more photos than six months ago, according to the 6Sight Social Imaging Survey Report. In addition, today’s photographers make pragmatic decisions about which devices, apps or services they could best use for various imaging tasks, says report author Hans Hartman. They are open to using newer alternatives such as smartphones, apps, or social network sites, but at the same time they don’t shy away from using more traditional devices, software, or sharing methods if these better suit their needs, the survey found.
The survey was conducted among 1,065 North American photo-taking consumers, 76 percent of whom own smartphones and 90 percent own digital cameras. For comparison, an additional analysis was conducted among 440 Europeans.
The survey found most people use several devices for taking photos. Nearly 60 percent of the survey’s digital camera owners who take at least one photo a month with that device also own a smartphone with which they take at least one photo a month.
The respondents use smartphones most frequently to take photos: 91 percent of smartphone owners take at least one photo a month with their smartphones, compared to 80 percent of the digital camera owners who do so with their cameras.
But the survey found digital cameras are used more for taking a larger number of photos: Digital camera users take more than two times as many photos than smartphone users do.
“With the proliferation of camera-equipped and internet-enabled devices, as well as the fast growing array of often free photo sites, apps and software, people have more choices than ever before for taking, enhancing or sharing photos,” says Joe Byrd, president and co-founder, 6Sight. “We wanted to learn how this connected generation of photo takers makes these choices, what drives their decisions, and in what direction their choices are trending.”
The survey and report will be featured at the 6Sight Future of Imaging Conference, Tuesday, June 26th.
The 49-page 6Sight Social Imaging Survey Report is available for $799 from the PMA Store here.
An interview with Hartman discussing the research is here.
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Popular photo sharing service Instagram has now expanded from Apple’s iPhone, where it launched, to Google’s competing Android mobile phone platform.
“We’ve already seen more than 30 million people join Instagram to create and share beautiful photos on their iOS devices,” the company says, “and now we’re thrilled to offer a way for Android users to join their iOS friends on Instagram to share their photos with the world.”
The free Android app “offers an extremely familiar Instagram experience” with “all the same exact filters and community as our iOS version.”
Instagram limits photo size and shape to square 2,048 by 2,048 pixel images.
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Google’s “Project Glass” attempts to take augmented reality off the smartphone and put it into a pair of glasses that will overlay information and graphics atop the wearer’s real-time view of the real world.
“We think technology should work for you,” the developers say, “to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.” The system “helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.”
The project posted a video here showing what the technology may do.
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