Here is a very late issue of the 6x6 mobile photography round up on the latest things I find interesting in mobile photography and related stuff.
The Guardian tries citizen journalism with EE
It was encouraging to see the launch of Witness this week. Carefully not promoted as citizen journalism and a bit short on social plugins it is an interesting platform idea for the post journalism age. Apparently it’s deeply plugged into the Guardian CMS to help surface content within the paper. Some of the assignments are a bit vanilla but I am sure they will get a bit more colourful. (Love the playdoh volcano!)
WoW promises a lens to transform the future of mobile photography
I quite like the look of the feature packed integrated WoW Lens. I love my olloclip but having it permanently encased like the Wow lens will prompt me to use it more.
The Selfie gets some stylish wood
With all the talk about mobile photography growing up its a shame the unfortunate the poster child of the genre, the ‘selfie’, is getting so much attention. But this most narcissistic image of our Present Shock age has been beautifully rendered into wooden canvases by the artist Golpeavisa. The classy images evoke a melancholic take on the falseness of the selfie shot.
Say hello to Pongr - the mobile social photo marketing platform
Pongr has been around for a while. Their image recognition technology has been quietly developing since 2008. It seems they have recently rebooted to offer ‘solutions’ for brands to mobilise their visual assets through their Photo Response Marketing software. Its includes a suite of gamification, direct response and shopper marketing applications where ‘brands can put their photos to work’. Pongr users can become ‘CEO’s’ of a brand by taking photos of their favourite brands and earning points and gaining super user titles. With brands thinking about investing in formal advocacy programs services like Pongr and their API will offer some interesting angles. (But the quality filters better be good!)
Memoto Lifelogging camera brings the quantified self to photography
Another Kickstarter project which is close to shipping. Memoto is a Swedish startup that mashes quantified self thinking with photography. This project looks very cool! Its a tiny automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory. It sorts hundreds of images into ‘moments’ and stores them in the cloud so you can retrieve and ‘relive’ your visual memories. I want one!
The world’s first open community coolhunting mobile game
iCoolhunt’s marketing jazz states it is a ‘cross platform geo-social game that lets users collaboratively identify and track emerging trends on a global scale’. A big promise. It essentially turns photo sharing into a coolhunting game. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks great. Although I do wonder whether the real cool hunters will use it?