Camera Phones On The Increase

It will be rare to find a mobile phone without a camera by 2010, analysts predict.

By 2010, 81 percent of total worldwide mobile phone sales will be sales of camera phones, says Gartner. By comparison, total worldwide sales of mobile phones with built-in cameras will account for 48 percent of mobile phone sales by the end of 2006.

"A camera is a feature that consumers expect to see in new devices whether they are interested in using it or not," said Gartner principal research analyst, Carolina Milanesi.

Worldwide sales of camera phones, which have almost tripled since 2004, will reach 460 million in 2006, an increase of 43 percent from 2005. This trend is set to continue, leading to sales of one billion camera phones by 2010, Gartner predicts.

Gartner also says companies will battle it out to increase the mega pixel resolution of the inbuilt cameras in the future. By 2007, Gartner predicts that more than half of the camera phones will have models with minimum one or two mega pixels.

"Consumers' perception that a higher pixel count translates into a higher quality device will encourage mobile phone manufacturers to continue with this drive," Milanesi said.

Sales of camera phones in Asia Pacific have seen rapid growth from 67.7 million units in 2005 to 106.7 million in 2006, the highest percentage growth of any region. Gartner says this is mainly attributed to higher consumer awareness of the products due to marketing efforts by manufacturers and operators.

Although the number of megapixels remains the main criterion by which consumers chose their camera phone, other features such as flash and automatic zoom are becoming important, Gartner predicts.

Upward Mobility

Ultrafast networks and whizzy features are about to turn your cellphone into—well, your right arm

Park Hyun-A is someone you might want to watch. A 21-year-old student at Korea University in Seoul, she'd like to be a marketing executive for a telecom or fashion company someday and enjoys playing matchmaker for friends looking for the perfect mate.

But what's really intriguing is the way Park uses her Samsung mobile phone. Each day she waves it over a reader at a turnstile in the train station to pay her fare. Then, during the long ride to school, she flips open the screen and rotates it 90 degrees to watch satellite TV. On the same screen, Park pages through an e-book version of Joachim de Posada's Don't Eat the Marshmallow...Yet!: The Secret to Sweet Success in Work and Life. She sends an average of 66 text messages a day, snaps pictures of cute guys and sends them to friends, and plays an online game in which she runs a virtual fruit store. "I can hardly think of my life without my handset," Park says.
[...]

Loopt is a $2.99-a-month service available through youth-oriented wireless carrier Boost Mobile in 41 states and parts of Mexico. It combines mapping software with global-positioning technology and proprietary code to send out alerts when a friend in your opt-in personal network is nearby. With Loopt, you also can view photo diaries of your friends' lives, "chirp" them with the push-to-talk feature on certain phones, and display maps that show where your friends have gathered.

Nobody expects a seamless transition to this new wireless world. Even in areas where there is plenty of venture funding, such as cashless payments and mobile TV, two startups will probably fail for each one that succeeds. More than a dozen companies already offer social mapping software similar to Loopt, and there's a good chance Google, Microsoft (MSFT ), or Yahoo! (YHOO ) could trump such services with their own ad-supported deals.

Features, however cool, may not always win fans. Wireless carriers expected digital cameras on phones to boost their data revenues as consumers e-mailed millions of pictures to one another. But in the five years since Nokia Corp. (NOK ) introduced camera phones, most pictures snapped by Americans remain in the phones' memory. On the upside, U.S. carriers were surprised by how readily Americans paid $2.99 for personalized ringtones. (Sometimes expectations are dead on: Everyone thought NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s (DCM ) Hello Kitty paraphernalia, heavily downloaded in Asia, would fail in the U.S., and they were right.)

The next big battleground could be your back pocket. Studies show that people notice their cell phone is missing within an hour of losing it, compared with a day or more for credit cards and wallets. Such insights helped persuade MasterCard (MA ), Visa, and American Express (AXP ) that phones are central to people's lives and actually could start to replace wallets. The Big Three are working with handset makers and service providers to add low-power chips for two-way communication between handhelds and payment systems, on the model of Seoul's electronic turnstiles.

Have Camera Phone? Yahoo and Reuters Want You to Work for Their News Service

Hoping to turn the millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into photojournalists, Yahoo and Reuters are introducing a new effort to showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by the public.
Starting tomorrow, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States, according to comScore MediaMetrix. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.
“There is an ongoing demand for interesting and iconic images,” said Chris Ahearn, the president of the Reuters media group. He said the agency had always bought newsworthy pictures from individuals and part-time contributors known as stringers.
“This is looking out and saying, ‘What if everybody in the world were my stringers?’ ” Mr. Ahearn said.

Young wireless users see phone as social network

While most U.S. consumers still see a mobile phone as, well, a phone, young wireless users increasingly view it as a way to meet new friends, share pictures and maybe, to find love.
The rise of community-based Internet sites and services has been as well-documented as it has been lucrative. High-profile sites like YouTube and MySpace have sold out for vast sums, while lesser-known destinations such as Flickr, Facebook and Snapfish continue to attract attention from both Web surfers and investor
Community-based mobile Web services also are showing remarkable uptake among users between the ages of 13 and 17, according to figures from M:Metrics. The Seattle-based market research firm found that youth users are nearly twice as likely to upload both photos and videos to the Internet from their handsets, with nearly 9 million kids posting a cell-phone picture in the last month.
And in these early days of 3G, it appears the U.S. market for such services is virtually untapped. A recent study from Telephia found that 15 percent of Spanish subscribers use their phones to capture video clips-five times the rate of U.S. users.
But youth-focused wireless applications needn't be high-tech to be popular. Young subscribers are far more likely than the average user to access instant-messaging services, and-unlike most other consumers-are more likely to use IM on their phones than to access e-mail. Mobile chat services like those from Match.com are also appealing, drawing more than 7 percent of youth users.
While young users may need to take out the trash or mow the lawn to afford a couple of ringtones, their appetite for mobile content and services is huge, according to the Wireless World Forum. Youth spending accounts for nearly 50 percent of all wireless data revenues in many mature markets, the market research group said in a recent report, and the average 10-year-old will spend nearly $30,000 on mobile services over a lifetime.
Just as importantly, half of that sum will be spent by the time that kid hits the age of 35.
To attract those young users, though, would-be suitors should stop hyping whiz-bang technology and instead focus on the practical, community-building qualities of mobile applications, the organization said. Even mobile music offerings, which are a natural fit for teens accustomed to taking an iPod everywhere they go, should encourage users to listen to samples of their friends' favorites and recommend tunes to like-minded teens.
"Rather than being a handset, a games console, technology or a gadget, think about the mobile phone as a tool to facilitate social interaction," the Wireless World Forum urged. "For youth, the mobile phone is a tool to connect, to express, reinforce and make new friendships."
Of course, there's no shortage of Internet-based companies moving into mobile. Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. continue to crash the gates of wireless, and MySpace and its fellow community sites seem to be adding mobile functionality by the day.
As the traditional Internet collides with wireless, though, it may be the mobile-first players that have an edge. Youth-focused, community-based startups like AirG and Jumbuck Entertainment Ltd. have cultivated impressive followings and already have both the carrier relationships and technological expertise-two substantial hurdles for anyone looking to mobilize their application.
FunMobility Inc., a Pleasanton, Calif.-based wireless developer of community applications like America's Best Mobile Pix, said it is gaining cross-traction by offering special features to the subscribers who log on via a PC as well as their phone. While users still have to go through carrier decks to buy the application, they can use a computer to perform sophisticated tasks like inputting information and manipulating photos.
The cross-platform functionality also helps users cross the bridge of the fixed-line Internet-where so much content is free-to wireless, where they're accustomed to paying for extras, said Adam Lavine, FunMobility's chief executive officer.
"It's a bit of a delicate dance integrating the two, but if you can successfully integrate the Web and mobile, we think, it's a huge opportunity," Lavine said. "We see a pretty big opportunity to build a lot of revenue for ourselves and our carrier partners by doing this."

PhotoBucket Leads Photo Sharing Sites; Flickr at #6

In the SF tech bubble that I live in, most of the talk about photo sites has been centered on Flickr. In fact, you could get the impression from most people I meet that Flickr is the ONLY site at which you can share and store photos. Examination of the category however, shows that Flickr is #6 among the top 10 photo sharing sites, with a market share of 5.95%. Industry standbys like Yahoo! Photos, Webshots Community, and Kodak Gallery currently rank higher than Flickr. Photobucket dominates the category, with a 44% market share. It surpassed Yahoo! Photos in January, and its share of visits increased by 34% in the four months from February 2006 to May 2006. Flickr, my friends should be happy to note, has also been growing rapidly, increasing 44% in the past four months, and up from a rank of #9 in this category one year ago (week ending 6/18/05). Slide has also taken off this spring, with its visits increasing more than ten fold in the past four months. Photobucket, Slide, and Imageshack are all image hosting sites, and MySpace is their primary source of traffic. In fact, MySpace was responsible for 76% of Slide's traffic in May 2006, 56% of Photobucket's traffic, and 50% of Imageshack's traffic. The growth of Photobucket and Slide go hand in hand the growth of consumer generated content and social networking sites, as I've reported before. It's amazing to consider that the 1.39% of the downstream traffic from MySpace that goes to Photobucket could be largely responsible for Photobucket's category dominance.