Smartphone cameras are great — except, usually, for zooming in, lighting and producing high-quality photos.

Researchers at MIT, however, have developed a processor chip that they say can instantly convert mobile device snapshots into professional-looking pictures.

The chip, pictured here, integrates into any mobile device or digital camera, and can be used to improve lighting, apply effects and kill low-light background noise. Plus, researchers say, it uses significantly less power than full computer processors or video cards.

One of the chip's tasks enhances low light photos. "Typically when taking pictures in a low-light situation, if we don’t use flash on the camera we get images that are pretty dark and noisy," Rahul Rithe, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, says in a press release. "And if we do use the flash we get bright images but with harsh lighting, and the ambience created by the natural lighting in the room is lost."

So, to avoid photos turning out like this, the chip takes two images — one using flash, one without it — and combines only the most desirable parts of both photos into a composite image.



It's unclear when the processor will come to market. The group presented their findings at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, which wrapped up today.

Does this sound like something you'd use?

To learn more, and read the official release here.

6 Apps for Editing Photos

5. Filterstorm

Filterstorm offers many of the same features you might find in a powerful desktop photo editor on your mobile phone. The app can support up to five layers at a time, and allows you to make adjustments to the image including brush, gradient, color range, vignette or selecting opacity. You can work with the brightness/contrast in a photo, the temperature, exposure, and saturation as well as crop a picture how you would like and specify a specific aspect ratio you’d like the final image to be.



Photoshop Express

Who says you need a computer to use Photoshop? Adobe Photoshop Express is a free, lightweight version of the popular photo editor that allows you to do things like crop and straighten your photos, as well as apply filters, effects and even borders to your prints.

The free app comes with a number of basic features. With a number of other filters, effects, and more available as in-app purchases.



1. Camera+

Camera+ is an app designed for not only editing your photos, but for taking them as well. The app has a built-in stabilizer for steadying your camera while taking pictures, a 6x zoom for getting close to your subject, and as well as a grid to help you line up your shot perfectly.

Once you’ve taken a photo, Camera+ has some built-in editing tools as well as a ton of built-in effects for giving your picture a finishing touch, as well as built-in borders. Finished pictures can be shared instantly on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr from directly within the app.



2. PicsPlay Pro - FX Photo Editor

PicsPlay Pro for Android has over 200 professional presets, allowing you to customize your photo on the fly. The app has several built-in themes such as HDR, Blur, Vintage and Black & White, and has real-time opacity control on those presets, allowing you to customize each one to best fit your own personal needs.
Photos edited using the app can be instantly shared with others on a variety of different services, including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.


3. Pixlr-O-Matic

With more than 100 effects, 280 overlays and almost 200 different borders Pixlr-o-Matic lets you customize your pictures quickly and easily to give them a seemingly endless array of different looks. In addition to editing photos already stored on your phone, you can also use the app to take new pictures. Finished photos can be shared with friends via Facebook, or saved to your phone as high-resolution files that you can then print out or use in other projects.



4. PicSay Pro

Ever wish your dog could talk? Anything is possible with PicSay Pro. The Android app has a number of traditional photo editing features such as the ability to remove red eye and crop and straighten photos, and adds to it special effects like the ability to add tech and word balloons to your pictures or make just a small portion of a black-and-white photo color.


Thumbnail image via iStockphoto, PeskyMonkey; post image courtesy of MIT


















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Mark Hughes is CEO and co-founder of C3 Metrics. Previously, Hughes served as vice president of marketing for eBay’s Half.com, where he grew the site to eight million online customers in less than three years. Follow C3 Metrics @C3Metrics.


Yes, we need to talk more about Facebook. That’s largely because if the company plans to do well in the post-IPO world it has to become more innovative about how it’s going to grow its ad revenue.

So Mark and company, here’s some free advice. Execute on three things to make shareholders happy: video, mobile, and analytics. Here’s why.

1. Video

Facebook doesn’t guess if you’re a man or a woman. It knows. Facebook doesn’t guess your age. It knows. Facebook doesn’t guess your interests and psychographics. It knows. It has the ability to target and scale. But where’s the video? Facebook’s announcement that it will let advertisers bid on ads is interesting, but more banners is not what Facebook needs. One of the three keys to Facebook’s stock performance resides in video, and not merely the fifteen-second versions from Madison Ave.

Facebook has the scale to enable custom video content that Colgate, Chevrolet, and every top-100 advertiser is yearning for. This means pulling from other sources. In other words, it should do more of what it’s already done with Google employees: Persuade them to leave Google and work for Facebook. The same is true for video content creators on YouTube. Persuade those YouTube content creators to make Facebook the home for their videos, and give them incentives to do so.

2. Mobile

The second key is location-based mobile. Imagine yourself shopping for a car. You have your smartphone with you, and stop by a car dealership to look. Without “checking into” the dealership or liking it, Facebook still knows you are at that specific dealership and could record the first step toward a purchase: You spent forty five minutes within 100 yards of a dealership. A week later, you and your smartphone are within 100 yards of two more car dealerships, where you also spend some time.

Through very simple behavioral analysis Facebook determines the obvious. You’re shopping for a car. Brands like BMW, Audi, and Mercedes are interested in this type of real-time, in-market data. In fact, this data is so valuable that Facebook could create an entirely new advertising exchange and advertisers could bid based on your intent.

In online advertising, we call this “pre-funnel” or “pre-search.” This is intent, and intent is the golden nugget that makes Google so valuable with advertisers.

3. Analytics

Many advertisers like Facebook, but it’s time for deeper analytics. Facebook has been reticent to invite traditional online tracking onto the company’s advertising platform. Why? Because online ad tracking is fundamentally broken. View-through pixels are not a standard on Facebook, and measurability has often been limited to on-site Facebook activity.

Every other RTB and DSP is held to accountable standards, but the fact remains that current standards need to replace the lie of last click attribution tracking. GM measured everything with last click attribution. But because social and display are often upper-funnel activities — driving awareness more than conversions — GM had no clue what it was doing when it yanked $10 million in advertising from Facebook.

To be fair, Facebook had no idea how it was performing for GM either. It’s in Facebook’s best interest to go beyond current standards and adopt view-though pixels, viewable impression standards, attribution modeling and other measurement advancements. Without them, Facebook will continue to get screwed out of performance credit, and we’ll see more and more stories like GM’s.






































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