Curse of the Camera Phone

Michael Agger on Slate has a written a wonderful and lengthy article summing up some of the most memorable stories about citizen reporting and describes the cameraphone as "our era's chronicler of infamy", notably for capturing Prince Harry wearing a Nazi costume, Kate Moss snorting coke, Michael Richards racist ranting in a small theater, the phenomenon of happy slapping and the execution of Sadam Hussein.

Even better, he has rounded up and put side by side in one single clip, all the video footages. Agger signs off with these very truthful words:

Now thanks to cameraphones we'll see the best of things, we'll see the worst of things. We'll see everything.

Yahoo Wants Citizen Journalism

Yahoo! News plans to launch a citizen video-journalist news service at the end of June that will act as a collection and publication site for news videos generated by the public. Red Herring reports.

"Sources involved in discussions with Yahoo News said the project, which has been in development for months, will introduce an upload capability that will take the PC out of the connectivity loop, so amateur video journalists can upload footage directly from the location of the event.

The idea for the citizen journalist site was inspired by the aftermath of London bombings a year ago, where dramatic photos taken by average citizens with cell phone cameras lent an aura of immediacy to the dramatic events."

PowerPhone's Technology Delivers Cell Phone Photos to 9-1-1 Operators

MADISON, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced yesterday that the nation’s largest city would be developing a system for accepting cell phone photos from citizens in its 9-1-1 and 3-1-1 call centers. A Connecticut company has already built a system that would do just that for the citizens of New York.

PowerPhone, a leader in 9-1-1 training and technology, unveiled the first system for delivering cell phone photos from 9-1-1 callers right to call handlers in August of 2006 at the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials Annual Conference. The new technology, which is called Incident Linked Multimedia (ILM), is part of PowerPhone’s Total Response^® Computer Aided Call Handling^™ software.

“Technology is changing the rules when it comes to emergency response,” said Chris Salafia, PowerPhone’s president and CEO. “Citizens are now the eyes and ears for our 9-1-1 operators—and camera phone photos are going to be an important part of improving the level of service 9-1-1 systems offer to the public.“

In a recent study conducted by a leading European mobile communications retailer in conjunction with the London School of Economics, over 50% of respondents said they would use their camera phone to record evidence of a crime and 47% said they would take pictures of a crime in progress.

Additional facts about cell phone cameras and emergencies

• The Gartner Group says worldwide sales of camera phones will reach 300 million in 2006.
• According to analyst Tony Henning, managing editor of the Future Image Mobile Imaging Report, "Nine out of 10 digital images taken by consumers [this year] will be captured with camera phones."
• Messaging company Mobile365 says the number of mobile-originated MMS messages it processed in the US increased 40% from the first to the second quarter of this year.
• Verizon Wireless customers sent 7.4 billion text messages during the fourth quarter of 2005.
• New York City police say a 15-year-old girl used her cell phone camera to snap a picture of a man who was exposing himself to her on the number seven train last month, reports the Associated Press.
• CBS2chicago.com reports that a Lemont Township man who tried to lure four teenage girls into his car last month was arrested after the same girls spotted him and took a camera phone shot of his license plate.
• For the first time, Swiss authorities have made an appeal to the public to submit camera phone photos or videos of the riot that followed a recent soccer match between the Basel and Zurich teams in the hope to identify the culprits. (From Nouvel Obs, France)

50 Percent of Worldwide Mobile Phones Will Have a Camera in 2006 and 81 percent by 2010, Gartner

Worldwide sales of camera phones will account for 48 percent of total worldwide mobile phone sales in 2006, growing to 81 percent by 2010, according to new forecasts from Gartner Inc. 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.

“A camera is a feature that consumers expect to see in new devices whether they are interested in using it or not,” said Carolina Milanesi, principal research analyst at Gartner. “With improved quality of camera phone pictures, users can now really enjoy viewing pictures on their PCs, printing them or uploading pictures directly from their phones onto their blog, thanks to services such as Flickr.”