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Submitted by Mike Grenville on Thu, 01 Jul 2004 12:28 |
By simplifying the ability to get photos from the phone to the web and using GPRS rather than MMS, Cognima Snap could be a useful tool to stimulate usage of camera phones beyond portable photo albums.
As MMS reaches its second birthday, the original dream that MMS would replace SMS seem as far away as ever and the search for bolt on applications that will stimulate OTA usage goes becomes more vital.
The launch of Cognima Snap follows a comprehensive consumer trial with a major UK mobile operator involving 620 users. The trial included examining the effectiveness of photo upload from camera-phones to an online photo album, comparing standard MMS upload to Cognima Snap.
Cognima Snap allows subscribers to effortlessly upload images or video clips at the press of a single key, using Cognima's patented data replication technology. The results of the trial reveal that Cognima Snap increased the number of photos uploaded from camera-phones to online photo albums by 14 fold.
Users also visited the online photo album more than twice as often and made more use of the album services, including sending pictures from the album to other phones. Two weeks into the trial over 70% of Cognima Snap users were still actively using the service, compared to only 18% of the participants using standard MMS to upload their photos.
"The trial demonstrates that there is significant demand for uploading photos from camera-phones but that the current user experience makes it too complicated for real people to use," said Simon East, CEO of Cognima. "Cognima Snap is essentially turbo-charging existing picture messaging services like MMS and allowing network operators and service providers to unlock this latent demand and derive extra revenues from their customers."
Picture Quality
Because of MMS file size limitations set by operators, if MMS is used to post pictures to web blogs or albums the picture quality received may only be 30k as opposed to the 300k in the original. This difference in quality will become more pronounced as phones as mega pixel cameras become widespread, (see examples below).
Cognima Snap gets round this by using GPRS to upload the photos rather than MMS. This also has the advantage of not using the slower and more unreliable MMS delivery method. The downside for teh operators however that GPRS data rates are a fraction of MMS charges. However the benefits of stimulating usage would seem toi outweigh the cost disadvantage, especially as MMS prices can only come down in the medium term.
Cognima is currently running trials of Cognima Snap(tm) with 15 major Network Operators and Service Providers.
www.cognima.com
picture quality comparison of 300k and 30k images
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