WIRELESS IMAGING EVERYWHERE

by Tony Henning

 The convergence of wireless technology with digital imaging and the Internet promises to extend personal and business communications – communications enriched by visual information – to any device, anywhere, anytime. That goal, once a distant dream, is now within reach.

As recently as two years ago, if you mentioned “wireless imaging,” people, even those in the wireless and imaging industries, would look at you funny. Now the buzz is everywhere. Picture mail on camera-equipped cell phones has produced more than six million new subscribers for Japanese wireless carrier J-Phone. Picture mail has been such a success that J-Phone offers more than a dozen models from nine different manufacturers that feature color screens and embedded cameras. By the end of the year, it will stop selling any mobile phone that doesn’t have a camera. J-Phone parent Vodafone can’t wait to launch the service and phones in Europe.

European telecom giants Nokia and Ericsson have introduced their own camera-phone models, and European carriers are counting on Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), the rich media follow-on to the wildly popular Short Message Service (SMS), to produce much-needed new revenues. Korean and Japanese carriers sold pictures and 10- to 20-second video clips to wireless subscribers and visitors during the recent FIFA World Cup there, and the service was a resounding success.

In the U.S., AT&T Wireless has introduced mMode Pix, the first wireless picture service in the U.S., using the Ericsson model with a plug-in camera module. Motorola and Sanyo say they also will introduce camera phones in the U.S. by year-end. Sprint PCS has launched its nationwide next-generation wireless service with much fanfare. The service is called “PCS Vision” and the name suggests the emphasis Sprint will put on imaging, as does its new ad campaign. Building on its theme of all-digital clarity, Sprint calls PCS Vision “Clarity You Can See and Hear.” PCS Vision also launched with a full lineup of “Vision-enabled” phones and PDAs with color screens as well as a plug-in camera module.

With declining revenues from voice service, carriers are looking to data services for new sources of revenue. These services will be packet-switched as opposed to circuit-switched, meaning billing is likely to be based on how many bits users transmit rather than how many minutes they’re connected. Nothing eats bits like images and other rich data types. Wireless applications and services for both business and consumer subscribers that incorporate visual information can help carriers maximize the use of their increased capacity and help justify the massive investments necessary to upgrade the networks. Subscribers won’t need 2 Mbps 3G networks for voice calls and text messaging.

But wireless-imaging activity is by no means limited to camera-phones and picture mail or to telecom players. Perhaps for the first time in the history of technology, no one company and, indeed, no one industry can implement a de facto platform for wireless imaging all by itself. No one is likely to pull a Microsoft or an Intel or even a Palm or AOL across international boundaries in wireless imaging. Delivering seamless solutions unequivocally requires the expertise and participation of a broad array of technology and service providers, of entrepreneurs and established businesses, in multiple industries, and from players in every area of the globe.

The wireless imaging value chain involves manufacturers of infoimaging components like sensors, chips, displays, radio transceivers and batteries; mobile device designers and manufacturers; wireless carriers and infrastructure providers; and back-end service and content providers. It needs imaging software developers to contrive better encoding and decoding algorithms to make rich media more digestible for limited airwaves and limited devices. It needs radio engineers to invent ingenious ways to pack more information, more reliably, into those limited airwaves. It needs everyone from tiny gaming companies to enterprise software vendors to media giants to create services and content that appeal to consumers and provide value to enterprises. And it needs business minds to design pricing models that help build momentum instead of stopping it in its tracks. In short, opportunities abound to participate in the explosion of visual communication without wires.

Nor is activity limited to wide area networks. Given today’s cellular infrastructure, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, the obstacles to achieving wide-area wireless imaging nirvana are daunting. Ubiquitous, fast and painless transfer of pictures without wires is still years away in most markets. But wireless imaging doesn’t stop there, or more to the point, it doesn’t necessarily start there. The ultimate goal of wireless imaging is to take pictures and instantly send them through the air to another device or networked storage space, no matter where you are, and retrieve pictures and look at them, no matter where you are. It doesn’t matter whether the distance involved is 20,000 miles or 20 centimeters.

The growth of wireless local area networks based on the 802.11 standard and generally called Wi-Fi – both publicly accessible “hot spots” and private corporate and home networks – is a bona fide phenomenon. Even the over-hyped and much-delayed Bluetooth is starting to show up in enough devices to make it useful. And there are newer, faster technologies ready to displace both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Cameras or other capture devices that can connect without wires to printers, PDAs, laptops, kiosks, or storage and display appliances offer real value now. Quite a few companies are incorporating short-range wireless capabilities in their current product releases.

Huge challenges remain but they present huge opportunities for innovative companies to devise clever ways to meet or sidestep those challenges and grab a leadership position in this emerging  segment of the infoimaging market. In the debate over which comes first, the network or the services, we are squarely in the services camp. For carriers to tell subscribers they have to wait for next-generation networks to get compelling new services is like a student telling his parents that he flunked eighth grade, but wait until they see how well he does in ninth. The current situation presents numerous opportunities to find a need and fill it. Experience, particularly in the Asian markets, demonstrates that viable, commercially successful solutions can be deployed today.

This article is excerpted and adapted from “Wireless Imaging – Overcoming the Challenges,” copyright 2001, 2002 Tony Henning and Future Image Inc. The report is available as a component of Future Image’s WIRE (Wireless Imaging Research Edition)  service dedicated to wireless imaging. For more information on the WIRE service, please visit www.wirelessimaging.info  or www.futureimage.com.