We have talked about million dollar cell phones on MOpocket before… but this one is definitely worth it and would like to find it in my pocket… and this one does not even have buttons. The phone which is made by designer Pilotfish and sensor maker Synaptics released to the world today the Onyx which understands signs and gestures, thanks to the sensitive touch pad covering most of its surface. It opens and closes applications when swiped by one or two fingers. The phone recognizes shapes and body parts. Judging by the fact that it will be sold in Europe I am guessing its a GSM phone.

The phone will be sold in Switzerland at the Millionaire fair on september 1st… and event MOpocket attends annually . The phone will be sold by Goldvish, a company used to selling designer phones for 24,000 to 1.26 million a piece.

Hey Goldvish, if you want to send any this way for me to review please feel free.

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Technorati Tags: onyx, synaptic, goldvish, cruise, pilotfish, millionaire fair

MocoNews reports that search giant Google has acquired Santa Monica-based mobile photo-recognition software firm Neven Vision. Old MOPocket readers will remember that Neven Visions technology was the first blogpost ever here on MOpocket in which I said…

But perhaps the coolest feature that Neven Vision is developing along these lines is an object recognition and visual search technology called i-SCOUT that Neven himself describes as “a visual google.” The image recognition algorithms can recognize anything from an ipod to a picture of the Mona Lisa to the flower in the above picture. Link this to a database of images and you have yourself a pretty nifty search platform for anyone sporting a camera phone.

So, now we have to wonder… what is Google up to… a visual search applications via mobile? According to MocoNews Neven’s technology will be used to better enable search within photos and will be incorporated into Google’s Picasa software.

“Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about.”

So, thats not bad for a start but their are so many other great things Google can do with this.

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Technorati Tags: bio metrics, google, m-learning, neven vision, picasa

Last week I drooled over the N93 after reading Rafe’s AllAboutSymbian review of the phone. We’ll now I am going to give my insurance broker father and brother a reason to drool as well (ok, me as well). As Darla Mack and Mobledia reported a couple days ago Nokia just released a special “Golf Edition” of the phone which enables you to capture your golf swing, analyze and improve your game by split screen swing comparison and other advanced analysis tools via a special Pro Session Golf application embedded into the phone.

The golf edition even comes with a ready to use golf-tailored viewfinder that instantly captures a player’s swing from the correct angles and distances. The system will even allow my brother and father share ideas, swings, drawings, tips, lessons and opinions, both face-to-face and remotely via e-mail and multimedia messages (MMS).

When the guy at Nokia told me about special golf stuff at the Mobile Monday Global Summit in Helsinki I thought he just meant the 3D game for the N93. I dod not realize he meant this… wow!

Tell you what Nokia, if you send me one of these phones I will take it to club with me and show it off to all the rich golfers so that they will order one as soon as they are done with their 18 holes… is it a deal?

Is Nokia going to start making special edition phones for all types of things… I think their is a greta market for this especially as smartphones start getting smarter.

Anyways, the best review on this is definitely Darla Mack’s so check it out!

Technorati Tags: golf, mms, n70, n93, nokia, smartphone

“What kind of flower is that?” I don’t know either. I have been inside playing with gadgets for too long to even remember what grass looks like. (I’m just kidding of course… the reason I can’t remember what grass looks like is because I live in NYC). Anyway, my guess is that it is some sort of daisy. Well, soon you will be able to use your camera phone to find things like this out. Neven Vision the Santa Monica, California Company founded by University of California computer scientist Hartmut Neven is taking the business of Image Recognition Software to a whole new low-cost microprocessing level. In other words, Image Recognition Software will soon be available for your camera phone and other consumer electronics. Cellphone companies like Vodafone Japan and NTT DoCoMo are already offering services that use Neven Vision Technology like “MovieMask” which reads your facial expression and then adds the appropriate special effect (like a tear if your sad for those of us who can never cry). Neven Vision is already talking with European dealers about using the same technology. Neven Vision is also applying their “Minority Report like” Biometrics technology to create a security application that reads your facial patterns, skin texture and iris pattern to secure your identity when making purchases via your cell phone (a day that has yet to come to pass in the US). Their Mobile Identifier software is already being picked up by law enforcement agencies in order to make it easier to identify subjects (by means of facial recognition and even fingerprints) in the field and is being considered for other types of security measures as well.

Of course, we can imagine how such a technology could be used in the reverse as a kind of pocket sized Orwellian nightmare. But perhaps the coolest feature that Neven Vision is developing along these lines is an object recognition and visual search technology called i-SCOUT that Neven himself describes as “a visual google.” The image recognition algorithms can recognize anything from an ipod to a picture of the Mona Lisa to the flower in the above picture. Link this to a database of images and you have yourself a pretty nifty search platform for anyone sporting a camera phone. Simply take a picture of an object. Send it to the database. And within ten seconds receive all the relevant information you need. “Eventually every building and object will be in the database,” Neven says. In 10 years “we’ll look back and wonder how we could have surrounded ourselves with so many blind machines.” The visual world literally becomes hyper-linked at our extremely mobile fingertips. So, the next time (within 10 years) you backpack through a foreign country, take a picture of that statue to find out how old it really is. Or snap a picture of that German road sign and translate it into English in order to finally understand what the Germans really mean by “Fahrt.”

Technorati Tags: biometrics