The Associated Press profiles the man who invented the first camera phone 10 years ago, and what the camera phone has wrought: Camera phone inventor awed by its power today. Excerpt:
"It’s had a massive
impact because it’s just so convenient," said Philippe Kahn, a tech
industry maverick whose other pioneering efforts include the founding
of software maker Borland, an early Microsoft antagonist."You go to a restaurant, and there’s a birthday and suddenly everyone
is getting their camera phones out," he said. "It’s amazing." …41 percent of American households own a
camera phone "and you can hardly find a phone without a camera
anymore," said Michael Cai, an industry analyst at Parks Associates.Market researcher Gartner predicts that about 589 million cell phones
will be sold with cameras in 2007, increasing to more than 1 billion
worldwide by 2010.Mix in the Internet’s vast reach and the growth of the YouTube
generation, and the ubiquitous gadget’s influence only deepens and gets
more complicated. So much so that the watchful eyes on all of us may no
longer just be those of Big Brother.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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