For millions of Americans today, the cellphone is simply a convenient way to make calls on the go. But if Philippe Kahn's vision plays out, consumers will soon be using their cellphones to take digital photographs that can be instantly transmitted over wireless networks to other cellphones.
Kahn, a technology entrepreneur whose first company was for a time the third-largest software company in the world, came up with the idea for his technology -- e-photos -- when he was assisting with the birth of his daughter, Sophie, four years ago. Frustrated by his inability to easily and quickly transmit photos from the hospital to family members, Kahn and his wife, Sonia Lee, determined they would bring such a capability to market.
These days, LightSurf, the company Kahn founded as a result of his frustration, is beginning to market the wireless technology he and his company of 100 employees have spent the last few years developing.
"Hey, a picture is worth a thousand words," he said, adding that his technology offers the best of both worlds: Cellphone users will be able to attach voice messages to the photos they send.
Already, LightSurf technology is at the core of a Kodak digital photography system installed in several large drugstore chains, including CVS and Rite-Aid. In that system, called the Kodak Picture Center, customers can have their film digitized, stored on a server and accessed via the Web. Eventually, customers will be able to access those photos via their cellphones as well.
In the LightSurf scenario, a cellphone user can attach a tiny digital camera to the phone -- or eventually be able to use one of several phones under development that have a camera built in. Some digital cameras will have wireless modems built into them as well, Kahn said. The system is designed to let the sender add a voice notation to the photo.
Once the user snaps a shot, the phone will transmit the photo over the user's cellular network, where it will pass through the LightSurf server. The key to the process is an acceleration technique meant to drastically reduce the time such a transmission takes. And if the connection gets dropped during transmission, there is a recovery system that is supposed to enable transmission to pick up where it left off.
LightSurf's technology is designed to adapt the photo to the receiving device, which might be a PC, a handheld computer or another cellphone. The process of sending a photo takes less than a minute, and the cost is US$0.20 to US$0.25 a shot, Kahn says. The question, of course, is just what the demand will be for exchanging tiny photos from one cellphone to another. Certainly, consumers are already becoming accustomed to doing more with their cellphones than simply make calls, like linking to the Internet to see sports scores or retrieve stock quotes.
And in Japan, where wireless imaging is more advanced and color-screen cellphones are already popular, a wireless Internet service from NTT DoCoMo is gaining steam.
Alexis Gerard, editor of The Future Image Report, says he thinks there is a latent demand for e-photos in the US. But analysts say that success depends on one factor: that the technology be easy to use. "Ninety-nine percent of the time with technological breakthroughs, people hadn't been asking for it," Gerard said. E-photo, he predicts, could be one of those breakthroughs.
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