A Camera App That Gets to Know Your Friends' Faces

A new app reminds us that facial recognition is the cutting edge of what is possible versus what we're comfortable with. MIT Technology Review reports.

For a couple of years, Face.com has offered websites and apps a facial-recognition service that can identify people in photographs, figure out how many faces there are in the picture, which is male or female, and how old they might be. Facebook is widely believed to be one of its customers, though Face.com refuses to comment on their relationship.

But with mobile photo sharing gaining popularity, Face.com CEO Gil Hirsch says the company—which started out by building face-finding and -tagging Facebook apps—wanted to build a mobile app that, unlike existing apps that use the company's technology, would give users real-time feedback about who their cell-phone camera is pointed at. It has done so with Klik, a free smart-phone camera app with the ability to recognize faces in real time and, if it can't recognize them, learn who it is you're shooting.

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Cell phones reportedly banned at Obama fundraisers

On the political fundraising circuit, the Obama campaign is reportedly asking that fundraiser attendees check their cell phones at the door, apparently to prevent audio and video leaks from inside the events. The campaign says the no cellphone rule applies only at small fundraisers in private residences,

Though Obama’s campaign says phone checking is standart procedure, Buzzfeed reports that “veterans of a range of other campaigns said they’d never heard of the practice, which is common in secure White House spaces where there are concerns of espionage.

[The Atlantic Wire via Death and Taxes]

Medical app uses augmented reality and camera phone to detect skin cancer

iMedicalApps gives DoctorMole app for Android a thorough and good review. "In our tests we discovered this app was remarkably good at detecting malignant lesions."

The app uses augmented reality technology to scan your moles in real time and give you instant risk feedback on Asymmetry, Border, Color, Diameter and Risk (ABCDE). It is quick and easy to use and allows you to save any photo you have taken to compare for evolution changes at a later stage.

Read more. via @jranck.

Cell phone imaging system makes light work of diagnostic tests

Researchers at University of California, Los Angeles have developed a rapid diagnostic test (RDT) system that works in tandem with standard cell phones. Vision System reports.

In poor and remote areas of the globe, rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) are helping to make disease screening quicker and simpler. RDTs are generally small strips on which blood or fluid samples are placed. Specific changes in the color of the strip, which usually occur within minutes, indicate the presence of infection. Different tests can be used to detect various diseases, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and syphilis.

But conventional RDTs are currently read manually by eye which is prone to error, especially if various different types of tests are being used by a health care worker.

To address such challenges, Aydogan Ozcan, a UCLA professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering and his colleagues from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA developed the new cell-phone based system.

Their RDT-reader attachment, which clips onto a cell phone, weighs approximately 65 grams and includes an inexpensive lens, three LED arrays and two AAA batteries. An RDT strip is inserted into the attachment, after which an image of the strip is taken by the cell phone camera.

Software then rapidly reads the digitized RDT image to determine, first, whether the test is valid and, second, whether the results are positive or negative, thus eliminating the potential errors that can occur with a human reader, especially one administering multiple tests of various test types.

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NCDV 'Drag Him Away' Campaign

Interactive billboards can occasionally encourage more socially beneficial behavior than playing giant games of Pong. Case in point—this clever installation at London's Euston Station by JWT for the National Centre for Domestic Violence.

The ad, which shows a man berating a woman, encourages passersby to visit a website on their mobile phones (or scan a QR code) and drag the man away. The series of connected digital boards works well with the message here, as the man is progressively removed further and further from his victim.

[Mashable via AdWeek]

Disruptions: Indiscreet Photos, Glimpsed Then Gone

A free and increasingly popular iPhone app called Snapchat allows a person to take and send a picture and control how long it is visible by the person who receives it, up to 10 seconds. After that, the picture disappears and can't be seen again. Bits reports.

Snapchat allows a person to take and send a picture and control how long it is visible by the person who receives it, up to 10 seconds. After that, the picture disappears and can’t be seen again. If the person viewing the picture tries to use an iPhone feature that captures an image of whatever is on the screen, the sender is notified.

The app’s description in the Apple App Store does not mention sexting. But the accompanying images are of scantily clad women, and Apple has designated the app as being for users 12 and older, warning of “mild sexual content or nudity.”

Read full article.

Juniper Research: Mobile adult subscription revenues to reach almost $1 billion by 2015

According to Juniper Research, mobile adult subscriptions will reach nearly $1 billion by 2015, with growth coming from smartphone and tablet users who access Internet on increasingly faster mobile data connections.

Some other findings from the report include:

-- North America and Western Europe will account for over 70% of total end-user mobile adult revenues.

-- Adult Videochat user base will more than triple by 2015 accounting for over half of mobile adult content revenues by 2015.

Read full article in intomobile. And Juniper Research titled: " “Mobile Adult Content: Trends, Drivers and Business Models 2012 – 2017.“ Image credit.

The Shadow QRCode

Adverblog on a successful marketing campaign in Korea using a shadow QRCode.

Emart is the Walmart of Korea. Their business is obviously huge, but they had a problem generating sales from 12 to 1 pm. So they came up with the idea of giving people a unique shopping experience only during lunch hours.

A shadow QR code, that naturally works only from 12pm to 1 pm. Once scanned, the code activated the Sunny Sale promotion, offering discounts and a $12 coupon to be used on Emart’s mobile commerce website or in the its stores.

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Future iPhone May Let You Gift Tunes by Tapping Devices

A patent filed by Apple suggests the company may start offering the ability to gift songs to friends via a future iPhone, using NFC. The patent talks specially about transferring digital media content from one user’s account to another. PatentlyApple via Mashable

NFC — a feature not current available on any iDevice — would allow you to make the transfer by simply tapping devices together. For sharing gifts with people you’re not standing next to, purchases could also be transferred via email.

Gifts could be sent along with a personal voice message, as well as an image. So you could send a friend or loved one a singing telegram along with a copy of your favorite song. The sender would only be charged for a song once the receiver decides to download it.

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More than half of under 16s have only used cameraphones to take photos

Research from photo book website MyMemory.com claims 52 per cent of under 16-year-olds have only ever used the camera on their mobile phones to take digital snaps, demonstrating the staggering impact the devices have had on the photography market. Mobile Entertainment reports.

Meanwhile, just 26 per cent of parents said their kids had access to digital cameras, while one-fifth said they own both cameraphones and digital cameras.

This all translates into 88 per cent of children having zero experience with analogue photography, which isn't unsurprising as just eight per cent of parents use the traditional method themselves.

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Swiss company develops an app for blind people to recognize products

Swiss company Codecheck has developed an app to help people who are blind or have poor vision to recognize products. The app detects and reads what is written on the package. Global Accessibilty News report.

Since it is difficult for people who are blind and low vision to find the barcode on the package, Codecheck has collaborated with the Swiss Federation for the Blind and people who are blind and low vision and developers to augment Scandit barcode scanning SDK with a function called “ScanGuide,” which guides the user through the barcode recognition process from start to finish.

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Are the Olympics seriously considering banning social network photos?

Amateur Photographer is investigating whether visitors to this summer’s Olympics will be banned from posting photos onto social networking websites, as conditions of entry for Olympic ticket holders state:

‘Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet more generally, and may not exploit images, video and/or sound recordings for commercial purposes under any circumstances, whether on the internet or otherwise, or make them available to third parties for commercial purposes.’

Good luck with that!

Descriptive Camera prints out text descriptions of what it sees

C/net reviews the Descriptive Camera by Matt Richardson, a camera that prints out text descriptions of what it sees, rather than actual photos.

There's a human element to making this work. Point the camera (in this case, a USB Webcam) at a scene. Take a picture. The picture is sent to Amazon's Mechanical Turk outsourcing service. A human writes up a quick description and sends it back. The camera prints it out using a tiny thermal printer.

Here's an example. The camera took a photo of an old building in bright light. The result is a printout reading, "This is a faded picture of a dilapidated building. It seems to be run down and in need of repairs."

Richardson describes the inspiration for the camera in an email to Crave: "It started as a 'what if there were a camera that could record what was happening in the photo as searchable text?' I made this camera to explore that 'what if?'"

Read full article.