This is actually fairly interesting as a technology. What could you use this for?
1) I could imagine busy parents using this to watch their kids at sporting events.
2) People could use this to document crimes in progress. What's more effective, a can of Mace or an iPhone held up taking a picture of an attacker's face and streaming it to FB? [Probably the can of Mace in the short term, iPhone photo in the long term, and yes, you don't need Color for the still. But for documenting a crime in progress, easily pushing photo + live video to 700 friends is probably going to be as or more effective than calling the police.]
3) Instant web meetings and tours of distributed facilities. Say you run a few McDonald's franchises and want to check in on each one without driving over. Click the photo of each one and get a quick facility tour from a phone to get an estimate of foot traffic, demographics, atmosphere.
4) Events in progress are an obvious application. They tried something like this a few months ago with the Royal Wedding, but it's much more interesting when it's not "experience static photos of people near you" but rather "experience life through a video camera held up by a person far from you". This is because photos of the event are not novel for the few people that are near, but live video of the event is novel for the many people that are far.
5) If they ship this soon, I expect it to be used for people to vicariously experience the Occupy Wall Street thing...or else perhaps for Halloween and then New Year's Eve. With the right promotion they could also pitch this as a cost-saving tool to reunite families that can't afford to travel on Thanksgiving/Christmas.
1) I could imagine busy parents using this to watch their kids at sporting events.
2) People could use this to document crimes in progress. What's more effective, a can of Mace or an iPhone held up taking a picture of an attacker's face and streaming it to FB? [Probably the can of Mace in the short term, iPhone photo in the long term, and yes, you don't need Color for the still. But for documenting a crime in progress, easily pushing photo + live video to 700 friends is probably going to be as or more effective than calling the police.]
3) Instant web meetings and tours of distributed facilities. Say you run a few McDonald's franchises and want to check in on each one without driving over. Click the photo of each one and get a quick facility tour from a phone to get an estimate of foot traffic, demographics, atmosphere.
4) Events in progress are an obvious application. They tried something like this a few months ago with the Royal Wedding, but it's much more interesting when it's not "experience static photos of people near you" but rather "experience life through a video camera held up by a person far from you". This is because photos of the event are not novel for the few people that are near, but live video of the event is novel for the many people that are far.
5) If they ship this soon, I expect it to be used for people to vicariously experience the Occupy Wall Street thing...or else perhaps for Halloween and then New Year's Eve. With the right promotion they could also pitch this as a cost-saving tool to reunite families that can't afford to travel on Thanksgiving/Christmas.
Just some musings...