PixSense v1.14

mkhan — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:06:53 -0500

There is another service that provides social photos and videos off mobile devices. It has cool features that include instant uploads, phone to phone video and photo sharing.

Check out some of these links from users posting videos:
http://beta.pixsense.com/gertv8/
http://beta.pixsense.com/boat/

Interesting

Denise — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 08:40:17 -0600

I don't have a camera phone but my mom just bought one and is trying to figure out good ways to move the pix to her computer. My son also has one, which I'm paying for!, and he never downloads his pictures. I'm going to have to discuss this option with him so I can see where my money is being spent. ;-)

Thank you very much for posting this.

~Denise

Why I heart Shozu

mobilejones — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 03:19:28 -0600

Reprinted from mobilejones.com

Rather than a blog recommendation on blogging while mobile, this article presents a nicely done tool for moving pics from a cameraphone to the web for sharing. Let me know if you find it helpful. Also, feel free to ask questions or recommend blogs, tools, etc. that should be featured here.

Shozu is a Symbian application which does one thing, but it does that one thing exceptionally well. Textamerica, Flickr and Webshots users can use Shozu to upload images from their cameraphones to the web. What's special about Shozu? Look at these two images.

Shozu has no unique UI. That's right. Shozu displays my Gallery of images as it exists on my Series 60 phone. The display of folders and navigation is simple because I am already familiar with the Gallery on my phone.

Not imposing a new UI on users isn't the only "considerate" intention of Shozu. Those who travel or live on an international border know how easy it is to find yourself roaming without realizing it. Data charges while roaming are brutal. I recently tried to upload some photos through Flickr and received an SMS from Shozu informing me that my transfer had been suspended, because I was roaming off my home network. Instructions for an override were provided or the option to do nothing, and the application would complete the transfer on my behalf when I was no longer roaming. Next, I received an SMS informing me that the transfer had been completed as I was no longer roaming. Now, that's a pretty considerate thing to do, especially the part about managing this situation for me. True simplicity.

It might be unfortunate for Shozu that their application doesn't work on more devices as a J2ME application might. However, the tight phone integration strategy means that Shozu can do more for me as user. Adding the option of immediately saving to Flickr for any image that I capture is so frictionless that it's almost always the choice I make. When it's easy, it's easy. That's good news for Cingular who benifits from my increased MMS traffic. In addition, other developers seem to be making the tight integration choice over the widely available and less capable decision. For example, Yahoo!'s new Go service is also a Symbian app. Does anyone remember the lessons of Microsoft and integration? Can you say WordPerfect? Anyway, it's an interesting strategy for which to wait and watch.

This is the kind of feature that more mobile apps and services need to emulate. Mobile operators, mobile application and services providers spend a great deal of ink and breath communicating the expenses and complications they face in building out mobility, and yet, the only services on the phone which have true value to the end user are voice and SMS.

After all this time and the billions spent, one might expect that mobile providers and enablers would understand that "always on" or background applications succeed in shocking numbers. Blackberry email like voice and SMS provide a service of notification and actionable options to the user. These services behave like services. This is the same line of thought that Marc Davis alluded to in his next phase of development for mobile devices as sensors. More about this in my next post.

Back to Shozu. The only complaints that I have for Shozu, and no doubt items on their to do list, are

1. Please remove the Shozu user as poster of my photos on Flickr (afterall, I'm the one doing the posting)
2. Add a per photo tagging capability, rather than, a tag list for all photos from Shozu.

Nicely done, Shozu.

BlogHer - Why I heart Shozu - Comments

PixSense v1.14

Interesting

Why I heart Shozu