Digital Online Photo Sharing for Mobile Phones

This solution allows users to create and participate in photo sharing without connecting to the wired internet thereby making online photo sharing truly collaborative.

The web based digital photograph sharing market is one of the fastest growing segments but most of the major players are tightly integrated to the internet thereby limiting the growth.

The users can seamlessly capture photographs on their mobile phones and share them with their friends on the move. It also allows users to upload and search pictures from the cloud.

Business Challenge:

Mandated to create a Mobile based offering that directly allowed people to create and participate in photo sharing communities without needing to log on to the wired internet and do this in real time.

Technically this translated to building a Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry and Symbian based software that would,

1. Seamlessly integrate with the device camera features/hardware.
2. Enable an RSS feed based mechanism to make incremental downloads and uploads of newly generated photographic content on the server, thereby intelligently minimizing the data transfer.
3. Implement socket based connection between device and server. Usage of Heartbeat strategy.
4. Have a compelling GUI for small form factor device.

Software Solution:

1. Instant sync, push emulated: photos available on other subscriber’s mobiles the moment a community user uploads photos from his or her mobile phone.
2. Enhanced picture quality: all the photos rendered are of best possible quality and take into consideration the device capabilities before rendering on the screen.
3. RSS feeds: the information communication between client devices and intermediary server is through the universally accepted RSS version 1.1 and 2.0.
4. Automatic download of photos uploaded by the user’s friends enables real-time communities.
5. Offline capability to display and browse the photos allows the users to experience the photos at anytime of their choice and without requiring all-time connectivity to the main server.
6. Flexibility to choose the actual feeds to which the user wants to subscribe.
7. Local data is stored on the static storage media of the device (e.g. SD Card, MMC Card etc) and in RSS enclosure format to eliminate the dependency between the underlying platforms proprietary database or file system.

Benefits:

1. The solution allows Smartphone users to collaborate with their colleagues and friends by sharing photographers on the move.
2. The solution has also helped our customer to be way ahead of competition based on the core advantage of offering mobility as well as advanced features such as automatic incremental download and optimal picture quality control.

Technology Domain: Blackberry, Windows Mobile (Smartphone/PPC) and Palm.