Father of Camera Phone Just Wanted Baby Photo

By MAY WONG

By MAY WONG

the associated press

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – The chilling sounds of gunfire on the Virginia Tech campus; the hateful taunts from Saddam Hussein’s execution; the racist tirade of comedian Michael Richards.

Those videos, all shot with cell phone cameras and seen by millions, are a few examples of the power now at the fingertips of the masses. Even the man widely credited with inventing the camera phone in 1997 is awed by the cultural revolution he helped launch.

“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 Corp. antagonist.

“There’s always a way to capture memories and share it,” he said. “You go to a restaurant, and there’s a birthday and suddenly everyone is getting their camera phones out. It’s amazing.”

If Kahn feels a bit like a proud father when he sees people holding up their cell phones to snap pictures, there’s good reason: He jury-rigged the first camera phone while his wife was in labor with their daughter.

“We were going to have a baby and I wanted to share the pictures with family and friends,” Kahn said, “and there was no easy way to do it.”

A decade later, 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 Inc. 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 YouTube , 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.

“For the past decade, we’ve been under surveillance under these big black and white cameras on buildings and at 7-Eleven stores. But the candid camera is wielded by individuals now,” said Fred Turner, an assistant professor of communications at Stanford University who specializes in digital media and culture.

The contraption Kahn assembled in a Santa Cruz labor-and- delivery room in 1997 has evolved into a pocket-friendly phenomenon that has empowered citizen journalists and personal paparazzi.

It has prompted lawsuits – a student sued campus police at UCLA for alleged excessive force after officers were caught on cell- phone video using a stun gun during his arrest; and been a catalyst for change – a government inquiry into police practices ensued in Malaysia after a cell-phone video revealed a woman detainee being forced to do squats while naked.

On another scale, parents use cell-phone slideshows – not wallet photos – to show off pictures of their children, while adolescents document their rites of passage with cell-phone cameras .

One of the recipients of Kahn’s seminal photo e-mail was veteran technology consultant Andy Seybold, who recalled being “blown away” by the picture.

Kahn’s makeshift photo-communications system led to a new company, LightSurf Technologies, which he sold to VeriSign Inc. LightSurf built “PictureMail” software and worked with cell-phone makers to integrate the wireless photo technology.

Sharp Corp. was the first to sell a commercial cell phone with a camera in Japan in 2000. Camera phones didn’t debut in the United States until 2002, Kahn said.

Though Kahn’s work revolved around transmitting only digital still photographs – video-related developments were created by others in the imaging and chip industries – his implementation of the instant-sharing via a cell phone planted a seed.

Kahn, 55, is well aware of how the camera phone has since been put to negative uses: sneaky up skirt shots , for example. But he likes to focus on the technology’s benefits. It’s been a handy tool that has led to vindication for victims or validation for vigilantes.

As Kahn heard the smattering of stories in recent years about assailants scared off by a camera phone or criminals who were nabbed later because their faces or their license plates were captured on the gadget, he said, “I started feeling it was better than carrying a gun.”

(c) 2007 Virginian – Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.