The increasing number of digital pictures upload everyday to the web from computers and mobile phones is a big opportunity to create a complete digital archive of our planet but is also creating some problems in finding the right pictures we are looking for.

Google has developed Similar Images, an effective beta service which enables people to find similar images starting from an image search. The search is related to the actual content of the image and not to the tag ore textual description. This feature helps users to find pictures of Paris before their vacation to France instead of some embarassing shots of Paris Hilton.

Nokia has released Point and Find,

an image recognition tool that allows users to capture an image with their mobile phone that will launch a site on your phone (*)

After shooting the picture, the application search in a databank and associate the picture to relevant information. It also has a GPS recognition which helps customers to recognize objects nearcby their position.

Take a look at the following video: a Nokia technician explains how the application works.

The broadband deployment, the upgrading of the network in order to enable the ultrabroadband is something considered essential for the economic growth.

But who will support the required investments?

Telcos operators, governaments, firms?

And if the answer would be….. Customers?

A new business model has been proposed as a new way to encourage broadband deployment: consumers purchase and own fiber connection, the “last mile” that run from their homes. This allows them to connect to a variety of service providers, including internet television, phone services, ultrabandwidth services.

Fiber would form part of the property right in the home

The proposal, called “Homes with tails” comes from Dedrek Stater , Policy Analist for Google, and Tim Wu  professor of Law at Columbia Law school in a working paper of the Wireless Future Program of the New America Foundation http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/homes_tails

What do you think about?

If it is unlikely to see a digital camera able to output a 4k movie before 2012 it is not unreasonable to expect the possibility of creating 4k movies starting from still images. Many of today’s digital camera can create pictures with a resolution of 8Mpixel (and over). We already have mass market software that creates movies by animating still frames (e.g. Photodex Producer) with very good result. The output is in MPEG4 with an HD 1080p resolution but from a software standpoint there is no problem in coding at a 4k resolution. Clearly, the processing time increases significantly as well as the required storage but for amateur production this may be fine since a slide show may run for just a few minutes.

Producing a 4k 5 minutes output may therefore require 4 hours of processing time (much less with a top of the line PC) and 20 GB of storage.

In Japan we already have two monitors with a 4k resolution available on the market (LCD technology, 50” hence a resolution of 80 dot per inch, 240 coloured pixels per inch) and we can expect these televisions to become more popular in the next few years.

These televisions would be of interest to people with the hobby of photography and this is a potentially broad market. However, only a minority (a small one indeed) of people using a digital camera are ready to process their snapshot to produce video clips. It takes a good computer, some familiarity with production software and a significant amount of time.

Hence, for the next few years this is bound to remain a marginal market.