14 DAY TRIAL // Camera phones have been part of our lives for some time now and it looks like soon, most mobile phones will come with a built-in camera. According to Gartner Group, 460 million camera phones were sold by 2006 and the number of such mobile phones sold by 2010 is expected to pass 1 billion.
The story behind the creation of the camera phone is somewhat odd, but interesting. The person responsible for its creation is Phillippe Kahn, the one that launched cellphone software company Starfish.
It all started when Phillippe Kahn's wife, Sonia Lee roared at him while spending 18 hours in labor. Equipped with laptop, cellphone and digital camera, Kahn thought about how inconvenient it would be to take a snapshot, download it to his laptop, post it on a website and then send emails to his friends letting them know where to look.
While his wife was in Labor, Kahn started fiddling with his hardware and writing code to glue it together. "I had time to make a couple trips to RadioShack to get soldering wire," Kahn says. "I just stayed in the room and made that thing work".
When his daughter was finally born, Kahn was able to use his newly invented contraption to take a snapshot and wirelessly post it for friends and family. As Motorola was in the process of buying Starfish, Kahn showed his invention to his new boss. The company passed on the cellphone camera.
Later, Kahn formed a new company, Lightsurf to offer PictureMail, a system that would enable a user to take a snapshot with a mobile phone and send it somewhere.
Now mobile phone cameras are much more advanced and most even come with video recording capabilities, but in the end, it is nice to know where all this started from.