Mobile Phone Advertising Done Right

The problem with mobile phone advertising is that it has the potential to annoy. Traditional ads like those from radio and TV would be extremely intrusive on mobile phones. So much so that the next killer-app for mobile phones may be ad filtering (though people may wonder why they have to pay for the privilege of not being advertised to on their mobile phones).

In spite of this, many companies expect cellphone advertising to be the next big thing in advertising so it looks like we will get advertisements on our mobile phones whether we like it or not.

Some companies and individuals have been thinking about how to advertise on mobile phones without annoying us, and in some cases helping us:

• Comparison shopping provides a place to advertise helpfully.
• Rivepoint , Cellfire  and others distribute shopping coupons on mobile phones.
• Various companies have shopping list apps. Examples are OneTrip Shopping List for iPhone and Apples2Oranges for iPhone. iPhone Shopping Lists has a wish list for these types of applications.
• Idle screen advertising such as Mobile Posse and Celltick .

These companies should do well, but there is no reason to believe that other companies will give up on annoying advertising. Given the mobile phone value chain and the mobile revenue calculator (included inline at the bottom of this post), application developers should get working on advertising filters.

Bigger Than TV. That Sounds Like ...

... Mobile Phones.

Bigger than TV, bigger than the internet: Understand mobile of 4 billion users by Tomi T. Ahonen starts by describing the scale of the industry

Lets start with comparisons. Newspapers? the total circulation of all daily newspapers worldwide is about 480 milllion. Cars? There are about 800 million cars on the planet. Cable and satellite TV subscriptions? About 850 million. Personal computers including desktops, laptops and netbooks, about 1 billion. Fixed landline telephone connections, about 1.2 billion. eMail users about 1.3 billion. Internet users about 1.4 billion. Television sets about 1.5 billion. And credit cards? About 1.7 billion people carry at least one credit card in their wallet.

But there are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions now in January 2009. More than twice the number of credit card owners, 2.5 times the number of TV sets or internet uses, approx 3 times the number of email users of total landline phones and yes, four times the number of personal computers. This is a monster sized industry, totally towering over all others.

Then he goes on to describe the growth rate

Its not just the size of the established industry. It is a dynamic industry selling a massive number of new devices per year. 1.18 Billion new mobile phones were sold in 2008 (IDC 2009). Compare that with approx 280 million new personal computers, laptops and netbooks sold last year, or under 300 million TV sets and we get to understand the scale. 

... at the end of 2008, the mobile content industry was worth about 71 Billion dollars worldwide, led by music, gaming, social networking and various TV, video and TV-related services such as TV voting by SMS ...For comparison, the total internet advertising industry is roughly of this size, as is the global radio broadcasting industry. DVD sales and rentals worldwide of all movies and TV content is slightly bigger at about 80 Billion which is also the value of the worldwide coffee industry. But mobile achieved this in just ten years sustaining a cumulative annual growth rate of 63% year-on-year for a whole decade, and still growing at almost 50% in the last year

76% of Japanese mobile phone users already use 2D barcodes...

The global penetration rate for mobile subscriptions is 60%. Europe has passed 100% per capita penetration and leading countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Israel and Italy are past the 140% subscription rate per capita. Yes, per capita, not per household. And not per "adult population".

That's a big advertising market and many companies are working on it. USA Today reveals

The confidential briefing, by Deepak Anand , a mobile marketing manager, was given to the Advertising Research Federation, a mix of advertisers and agencies, Google says. The company declined to elaborate, or to make Anand available for comment. A copy of the May 2008 presentation was obtained by USA TODAY; Google confirmed its authenticity.

In the presentation, Google also makes the case that mobile presents an opportunity to "reach out to captive users on the go." To illustrate that point, a slide depicts a search box with the word "burgers" typed in. Alongside it is another box showing search results, with an ad for Burger King stripped across the top.

What do people want from mobile search? In Google's view, consumers want "exact information," as they do on the desktop. "The key difference with mobile is that they immediately act on it."

The Apple iPhone, a big competitor to the G1, gets special treatment. Over Christmas 2007, Google notes, the iPhone "drove more traffic to Google.com worldwide than any other smartphone." In the USA, it adds, "the iPhone delivers 50 times the queries per device" than the average smartphone.

Why Are Smart Phone List Prices so High in Australia?

This article from The Australian IT gives the following prices for the following Windows Mobile phones

Sony Ericsson  Xperia X1 AU$1,499. 800x480 pixel 3in  touchscreen, 3.2 megapixel camera, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, slide-out QWERTY keypad

HP IPAQ 912c  AU$1,499. 800 by 480 3.8in touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth

XTC Touch HD AU$849. 320 by 240 pixel touchscreen, 3 megapixel camera, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 7.1Mbps HSDPA, QWERTY keypad 

This EDN  article says iSupply estimated the iPhone 3G BOM (bill of materials) to be US$173 in 2008 and predicted it to decrease to US$148 in 2009. Some of the component costs listed in this article were (in US$)

1. iPhone display $20 
2. iPhone CPU $13.50
   
3. iPhone HSDPA digital baseband $15.00 
4. RF Transceiver $4.25 
5. 2MPix digital camera $7.00 
6. GPS $3.0
   

Even with the higher resolution displays and cameras on the Australian Windows phones, it is hard to see how BOMs could be more than US$200, which is around AU$300 at current exchange rates. So where does the remaining AU$650 -AU$1,200 in the phone prices come from?

This blog recently looked at the mobile device value chain . Mobile phone manufactures are the "OEMs" in this value chain. They sell devices with software installed and their products comprise

1. Components and assembly (BOM)
2. Operating system
3. Software applications
4. Integration, testing, usability.
5. Marketing, sales, advertising
6. Support

This makes up the prices that sales channels pay. Distributors and retailers will mark up these prices to get the retail prices for the three phones listed above. Dealer markups of ,say, 50% would give dealer pricing of   AU$430 - AU$800 for the three phones

Components and assembly should be around AU$300 as mentioned above. The OS is unlikely to cost more than 10% of BOM. That makes the cost AU$330. Therefore the OEMs are charging 30%-110% of the cost of manufacturing, or AU$100 - AU$470 per handset, for software + integration + marketing + support

Considering how alike all smart phones are, specialized third party companies (e.g Wind River and Mobile Complete ) should be able to do integration, testing and support cheaply. It is hard to know what sales and marketing costs are but I will assume they are low for now. All in all it seems that smart phone prices are high compared to costs. Some possible explanations for this are

1. List pricing does not reflect actual street pricing.
2. OEMs are making big profits.
3. OEMs are developing phones inefficiently.
4. OEMs are adding a LOT of software to their phones

 In a future post I will attempt to determine which of these factors are most important.

Mobile Phone Apps

This post has formating issues. A better formated version is here .

In a previous post I discussed mobile phone APIs>. In this post I will look at the most promising classes of mobile phone apps.

Mobile Barcodes

Mobile Barcodes Background

Mobile Barcodes in 2008

Mobile Barcode Patents

Introduction to 2D Barcodes

Google print ads

QR Barcode Detection

Android Scan

Android Zxing

QmCodes 

2D Barcode Reading Apps
UpCode 

Nokia 2D barcode scanner

UPC 2D barcode reader for mobile phones

Neo Media Neo Media Patents

AirClic

ScanBuy

3GVision

Apps that Use Barcode Readers

Shop Savvy 

T-Mobile G1 barcode reader 

Mobile Phone Ticketing

Masabi Mobile Barcode Tickets

Personal digital shopping assistants

Compare Everywhere

GoCart

Biometrics based authentication

BioWallet

Products that help discover structure in information

Mobile Phone Video

Capture Cam from Richmond, VIC, Australia

Japanese mobile phone users are doing Live Video feed via Piconet

Mobile Advertising

How to measure the value of mobile advertising

Dream Eye Media from Australia

Continuum Mobile

Location Based Social Networking

Services Companies

New Media Studios Entertainment. An infrastructure provider & content aggregator of demographic specific new media content. It has two current content related initiatives CiVision and emtyspace.

Mo-Style mobile portal and community.

Further Reading
Top 10 Android Apps in 2008

WiMax
WiMax vs. LTE 

2009 pundit's predictions

Blogging on Ergo Sum

I just saw this on a Google search. It sounds like a good idea. No-one has figured out mobile marketing but this sounds like a resonable line of investigation.

ERGO SUM : towards simple and contactless mobile services at the point of sale

For the first time in France, a number of leading retail players (Auchan, Carrefour, Castorama, Fnac, Jules, Kinepolis, Leroy Merlin and Le Groupement des Mousquetaires), financial service providers (Banque Accord, COFIDIS, Finaref and LaSer), and mobile operators (Bouygues Telecom, Orange and SFR) have joined hands to launch a working group whose mission is to define the operation of contactless mobile services at the point of sale

Named ERGOSUM (ERGOnomie des Service sUr Mobile - ergonomics of mobile services), the project is placed under the auspices of PICOM, the competitive cluster dedicated to the retail industry, based in the Nord-Pas de Calais region. 

This joint initiative reflects the wish to offer simple and intuitive contactless mobile services at the point of sale with the following characteristics: 

- the same for every brand, 

- fluid for all services (payment and loyalty cards, discount vouchers, etc.), 

- compatible with existing electronic money systems, 

- consistent with the specifications laid down by AEPM (Association Européenne « Payez Mobile », the European mobile payment association), 

- interoperable for all mobile phones and operators. 

The players will focus on customer experience and the ergonomics of a full range of contactless mobile services at checkout counters, such as payment, the use of electronic vouchers and the allocation of loyalty points. 

The ERGOSUM initiative builds on the joint payment and public transport experiments and work done in recent years to foster the emergence of new daily mobile telephony applications using NFC (Near Field Communication) technology.

Mobile Phone APIs

This is currently a collection of references. I will add some comments later.

References
Apple Reveals iPhone SDK
New Era of Open Source for Mobile Phones
Linux mobile
Lips (Linux Mobile)
Android (Google Mobile)
Yahoo Mobile

Android phone slide show

Further Reading

Photo Sharing Website APIs. Why is Printing so Difficult?

Does everyone find it as annoying as I do that the big photo sharing websites don't have good printing interfaces, say Photoshop quality, and seem to be relying on pushing cusomters to photo printing companies for business. As a user of these sites, it seems to me that a lot user-value could be added in a straightforward way.

But first some background:

Comparison of Traffic on Photo-Sharing Sites

APIs
http://code.google.com/apis/picasaweb/developers_guide_protocol.html seems clean
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/
http://www.snapfish.com/
http://www.kodakgallery.com/Welcome.jsp
http://www.shutterfly.com/
Photo Sharing and Printing
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,127882/printable.html
http://gallery.menalto.com/node/954
Potential Back End
http://www.enomalism.com/features/next-generation/
Interface to Mobile Phones with Cameras
http://peterwilliams97.blogspot.com/search?q=mobile+phones


Potential Plugins
Printing to computer printers (instead of print shops)
Image filters
Image analysis
Photo organization
Making people more attractive which could also impact crime rates .
http://machine-learning.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-translation-flickr-api.html

The Future of ICT

It is worth thinking about the future from time to time. It helps us craft investment strategies and career paths that match the major trends in the world. So what is the future of ICT?

My guesses are

1. Simplification.
2. Movement to the cloud.
3. Fixed/mobile convergence.
4. Integration of simple cloud services. (1+2)

Modern ICT systems are insanely complex while the most productive computer users I know all use simple tools. 

Most of the things we do we with computers are much simpler than the popular packages are capable of. e.g. Editing some text does not require a full blown desktop publishing program like MS Word, yet MS Word is the most popular text editor in the world. Likewise keeping track of some customers and inventory does not require a gigantic package like SAP, yet SAP is the biggest selling ERP software package in the world.

The costs of learning these immensely complex packages are considerable in terms on time lost. There is probably a much higher cost in working as slaves to these packages which distracts from finding the best solutions to an enterprise's problems. A current trend in corporate ICT is to use "best of breed" packages with the minimum possible customization because the payback from customizing is much less than the cost. (BTW, this does not seem to be true for ERP). This means that enterprises that enterprises are paying the cost of  not solving their ICT problems as well as they could. This cost has to be a significant fraction of their ICT budgets.

This article explains why "best of breed" software packages sell well. It boils down to the promise of lower total cost of ownership (TCO) through using a single vendor for all services and a mega-brand that makes buyers feel safe. 

SAP ERP systems effectively implemented can have huge cost benefits. Integration is the key in this process. "Generally, a company's level of data integration is highest when the company uses one vendor to supply all of its modules." An out-of-box software package has some level of integration but it depends on the expertise of the company to install the system and how the package allows the users to integrate the different modules.

Movement to the Cloud

Centralized computing is much more efficient than desktop-centric computing. TCO decreases dramatically with centralization because maintaining and upgrading software running in one physical location is far easier than on many people's personal computers. 
Most client software, even computationally intensive software like high quality graphics, has very low duty cycles. It does nothing most of the time. When you buy expensive PC hardware to support it, you are paying to support peak usage, the few minutes per day when it does the tricky computations and you want the user interface to be responsive. The average computer resource usage of this software is very low, much less than 10%. Therefore running the software on a central server is much more the 10x more efficient.
Expensive infrastructure such as high-reliability disk storage does not need to be replicated through an organization. Virtualization, SaaS etc only became effective in the last few years so many software and hardware vendors built their (then efficient) businesses around powerful client PCs running software locally.

Fixed Mobile Convergence 

When simple applications and cloud computing become dominant, the requirements for terminals become much less. Smart phones and 3G netbooks are already very capable and are becoming more so. They also use little power and are portable.

The next level of usability is to have one device for fixed and mobile work. That device should be able to work with WiFi and 3G networks and move seamlessly between them. The technology for this is maturing.

From Wikipedia

A clear trend is emerging in the form of fixed and mobile telephony convergence (FMC). The aim is to provide both services with a single phone, which could switch between networks ad hoc. Several industry standardisation activities have been completed in this area such as the Voice call continuity (VCC) specifications defined by the 3GPP. Typically, these services rely on Dual Mode Handsets, where the customers' mobile terminal can support both the wide-area (cellular) access and the local-area technology (for VoIP). However, an alternative approach achieves FMC over 3G mobile networks - eliminating the requirement for Dual Mode. This approach, broadly termed cellular FMC, is in trials by telecoms operators including BT.

An alternative approach to achieve similar benefits is that of femtocells .

Integration of simple cloud services
When cloud computing is widespread and simple cloud services are widely available, integration  companies will be able to assemble tools to meet the needs of businesses. This should be a vast business since it competes with the mega-apps Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Siebel etc and the mega-glue Tibco etc.

If the recent history of software development is a guide, nimble companies will start to build effective suites and grow rapidly to  form a foundation for this industry, then they will be followed by specialist companies who will take care to make their software inter-operable. This will evolve into a software ecosystem and sales channels will emerge. With fixed mobile convergence in the mix, application stores may be used for sales, removing the need for sales and marketing teams in the startup companies that start this new business category.

At this time  the setups of hyper-productive software users will be easy to replicate in the cloud. User applications will  be available to users as simple serices on simple devices like 3G netbooks. Enterprise applications will run in the cloud with simple interfaces. Business outsourcing will be simple because the software will run in the cloud with well-defined APIs.

The Consequences

1. These changes will result in a dramatic increase in productivity that will boost economies world-wide.
2. Software will be simple so ICT staff will not be slaves to the machines of gigantic software packages.
3. This will free up ICT staff's time to add business value which will increase productivity even more.

Photo Credits
threesixtyfive | day 244 by Sybren A. Stüvel.
What is ERP anyway? (MS&T ERP Center, 01/29/2009) by MS&T Center for ERP.
Skype Crashing on iPhone Fix by theleetgeeks.
Modern Times by jampa.

NeoMedia. Big Player in Mobile Communications? (U.S. Patent No. 6199048)

 The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has ruled in favor of NeoMedia  in the re-examination of its U.S. Patent No. 6,199,048 , System And Method For Automatic Access Of A Remote Computer Over A Network. The full story is here .

This patent was discussed in a previous post and it seems valuable because it covers such a broad range of useful mobile phone applications. From the EFF's description :

The idea behind the inventions claimed in this patent can be broken down into three steps:

1. some index must be read off of a data carrier;
   
2. that index is used to look up information; and
   
3. that information is used to form a connection with a remote computer.
   

For example, suppose a consumer walks into a supermarket and comes across a brand of soup he has heard about but never seen before. The consumer wants to get more information on this product, and he turns to his web-enabled cell phone to see if the company who produces the soup has a web site with more information about the product. Instead of running a search on any widely-known search engine, the consumer types the UPC number found on the can of soup into his phone. The phone then looks up a web site associated with the UPC number, and that website is loaded into his phone’s web browser.

Sure enough, most of the early useful Android applications work like this. With 4 billion mobile phones in the world , NeoMedia are looking interesting.

NeoMedia's Stock chart shows that even though their stock price more than doubled on the news of their patent victory, their market cap is still only US$6M .

Still a very interesting company.

Yorkville Advisors is the principle investor and majority debt holder for NeoMedia Technologies.

This stock board  tracks NeoMedia.

First Android Phone From HTC

The WSJ  says T-Mobile USA plans to begin selling the first smart phone powered by Google Inc.'s new mobile software late next month ... The phone's manufacturer, HTC Corp....  says it expects to ship 600,000 to 700,000 units of the smart phone, dubbed the Dream, this year... T-Mobile, a Deutsche Telekom AG unit, is expected to announce the phone Sept. 23 ...HTC, which is based in Taiwan and is a large provider of phones for Microsoft Corp.'s mobile software, declined to comment   

Android Phones Not Robust?

I read this CNet Australia article which said in part:

Google's Android mobile platform wasn't robust, Telstra chief executive Sol Trujillo said in an interview published yesterday, where he also disclosed he owns an Apple iPhone, among other handsets.

"We are looking at it," Trujillo said in the interview  with ZDNet.com.au sister site CNET News.com, responding to a question about Android. "But the platform isn't at the stage where it's really robust. We are looking at what's being said about it in the blogosphere, and we're looking at testing it."

Which just goes to show that telco executives have a different, and presumably better informed, view of new technologies than people like me who know a few people working on those technologies.

A quick web search showed that Steve Ballmer had expressed some scepticism about Android to Trujillo at the Telstra Investor Day conference in Sydney late last year:

"They (Google) can hire smart guys, hire smart people, blah-de-blah-de-blah," Mr Ballmer said. "I don't really understand their strategy, maybe somebody else does. Turning up to an investor meeting saying, 'we've just launched a mobile operating system with no revenue model, yay!' – I wouldn't do that," he said. "I don't get the business model."

Meanwhile those Android folks keep on developing very useful stuff .
Further Reading 

Movement to the Cloud

A current major trend in enterprise IT is to re-centralize computing and have smaller clients. Total cost of ownership (TCO) decreases dramatically with centralization because maintaining and upgrading software running in one physical location is easier than doing it on many people's personal computers. 

Most client software, even computationally intensive software like high quality graphics, has very low duty cycles.  It does nothing most of the time. When you buy expensive PC hardware to support it, you are paying to support peak usage, the few minutes per day when it does the intense computations and you want the user interface to be responsive. The average computer resource usage of this software is very low, much less than 10%. Therefore running the software on a central server is much more efficient. There is the additional benefit that expensive infrastructure such as high-reliability disk storage does not need to be replicated through an organization.

There are many types of cloud services including virtualization, SaaS  and web applications . Most of these  have become highly effective in the last 10 years. Their development has been driven by companies such as Google, VMware and Salesforce.com who have based their businesses entirely on these types of services and have not pursued desktop computing strategies. 

3G netbooks and very capable smart phone make adequate clients for Web Services, SaaS, Virtualization and other cloud offerings.  They have the additional advantages of low power consumption that comes from their phone ancestry and mobility.

Here are some stories to support this 

1. Move from Windows Laptops to Netbooks in 4Q08 In 4Q08, worldwide PC processor unit shipments declined –17.0% quarter over quarter (QoQ) and –11.4% year over year (YoY); ... Intel's Atom processor for mini-notebook PCs (which Intel calls ''Netbooks'') continued to make a notable difference in the overall market performance but not enough to help the market avoid dramatic decline. Without Atom, worldwide PC processor unit shipments declined –21.7% QoQ and –21.6% YoY
2. Intel readying for rise of Android-based netbook Intel readying for rise of Android-based netbooks Intel is expecting a flurry of Android-based netbooks in late 2009 and throughout 2010, and is preparing to support manufacturers with suitable chipset hardware. That’s according to VentureBeat’s “reliable source”, who suggests that the chipmaker - responsible for the Intel Atom N270 processor found in the vast majority of netbooks on the market today - is betting that Google’s open-source mobile platform will find a niche among what are usually Ubuntu or Windows XP machines
3. RCR Wireless 2009 Wireless Forecast: Chips Meanwhile, Qualcomm has placed emphasis on its Snapdragon chipset for notebooks, netbooks and mobile Internet devices, with the latter category projected to surge as netbooks bridge the price gap between laptops and handhelds...Qualcomm will have competition, as Intel Corp. — the world’s largest chip maker — has targeted MIDs as PC sales rates slow, hoping to grab some of the market served by Apple Inc.’s iPhone. PC maker Dell Inc. is rumored to be preparing a smart phone play to open new markets. ...Meanwhile, most chip vendors are looking to core strengths and seeking bright spots in the year ahead. Smartphone sales are projected to grow this year — analysts vary on the strength of that growth — and vendors who make GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips and 3G modems have a fighting chance, analysts have observed. ...“These are bright spots,” said Will Strauss, principal at Forward Concepts. “3G in general is still growing.”
4. Cloud computing ascends the mainstream (The Age 20 Feb 2009) illustrates how mainstream cloud computing has become. Juicy Orange pays 10 to 80 cents per hour for the virtual service, which means it has stopped forking out for physical hardware - it has become a web development company with none of its own computers. "We don't spend hours and days waiting for physical hardware installations any more. I'd be hard-pressed coming up with any real disadvantages. Once we got over the learning hump, it's been nothing but better," says Mr. Murphy

Cloud computing requires fast, reliable and portable network connections. The telecommunication carriers who can provide this will achieve a pricing advantage over their competitors

Some Consequences of Movement to the Cloud

1. Cannibalization of existing sales. What will netbooks do to the PC and laptop value chain? Currently netbooks are growing the PC pie but in the longer term US$250 netbooks may cannibalize US$1000 laptop sales at great cost to Intel and Microsoft. Netbooks are well-suited to cloud computing so netbook + cloud may replace laptop the Microsoft software. Google, salesforce.com, Amazon and other software already works well from the cloud while Microsoft Word does not so well-suited. The $250 vs. $1,000 price difference will drive change.
2. Possible convergence of smart phones and netbooks.
3. Processor wars. Intel Atom, Qualcomm Snapdragon, Freescale’s ARM based chipset.

Google Picasa to have Face Recognition

Here is a round-up of the news articles from this morning. Look at the blog list at the bottom-right for more.

Cnet: "Revamped Google Picasa site identifies photo faces" The "name tag" feature presents users with collections of photos with what it judges to be the same person, then lets them click a button to affix a name. Once photographic subjects are named, users can browse an album of that individual on the fly.

The Picasa Web Albums name tag feature groups like faces together to let users tag them with names a batch at a time (click to enlarge).

(Credit: Google)

"

Techcrunch "Picasa Refresh Brings Facial Recognition" The facial recognition technology comes to Picasa thanks to an acquisition Google made in 2006 of Neven Vision, a company that specialized in matching facial detail with images already found in a centralized database. Picasa’a facial recognition technology works in much the same way.

Web Pro News "Googles picasa takes on facial recognition"

Analysis
It is interesting that Google chose Neven over companies such as

Idée's TinEye
Imprezzeo
Polar Rose
Riya , and
ilooklikeyou.com

Neven Vision were the creators of the NV1-norm algorithm that did so well in the NIST Face Recogntion Vendors Test .


According to this article Neven have a good patent portfolio in image search. Hartmut Neven was assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California at the Laboratory for Biological and Computational Vision. Later he returned as the head of the Laboratory for Human-Machine Interfaces at USC’s Information Sciences Institute.  Neven co-founded two companies, Eyematic for which he served as CTO and Neven Vision which he initially led as CEO. At Eyematic he developed real-time facial feature analysis for avatar animation Neven Vision pioneered mobile visual search for camera phones and was acquired by Google in 2006. Today he manages a team responsible for advancing Google’s object and face recognition technologies. I wonder if that means Neven is supervising all the SIFT work for Visual Rank

Detailed List of Neven patents . 
The key face recognition patent in this list appears to be US Patent 6,222,939 Granted April 24, 2001 Filed June 25, 1997
Abstract A process for image analysis which includes selecting a number M of images, forming a model graph from each of the number of images, such that each model has a number N of nodes, assembling the model graphs into a gallery, and mapping the gallery of model graphs into an associated bunch graph by using average distance vectors .DELTA..sub.ij for the model graphs as edge vectors in the associated bunch graph. A number M of jets is associated with each node of the associated bunch graph, and at least one jet is labeled with an attribute characteristic of one of the number of images. An elastic graph matching procedure is performed wherein the graph similarity function is replaced by a bunch-similarity function.
 

Face Recognition for Android?

A lot of  smart people end up at Google. Even Hartmut Neven is there. Does that mean that Android will have face recognition, general object recognition and gaze tracking from the phone's camera? It sounds straightforward: upload the picture in the Google computing cloud, analyze it and download the results. No need to run the image recognition locally on the phone the way Neven used to.

What is the face recognition API called? All I can find is the face detector API.

What Other People Are Saying
Did Google Pull a Neven with Enkin? speculates that Google are going to use image recognition as a way for mobile camera phones to interact with the world, in particular by machine-readable codes on printed pages. I surveyed machine readable codes for printed pages in a previous post .

This speculation is interesting because I always thought the killer app for mobiles would be image recognition + machine readable codes on printed pages + OCR + speech recognition + location awareness, along with an engine to deduce useful information from the data . Maybe it's a more obvious idea than I thought. Don't throw out your copy of Duda and Hart!