Upwardly Mobile: Bring back MMS

Given the ubiquity of cameraphones these days, Jo Best argues it's time for some new services to take advantage of these none-too-shabby snappers. The answer could lie in the grande dame of mobile services, MMS...

Remember your first cameraphone? I do. It was rubbish. Every single picture I took looked like a photo of a black and white Magic Eye picture in a rainstorm, displayed on a screen with a Pac-Man-esque resolution of six pixels.

Still that was the early noughties. Nowadays Nokia is the world's biggest camera manufacturer, and companies such as Samsung are packing up to 10 megapixel snappers into phones.

Cameraphone tech has moved on immeasurably yet it's still a eunuch in the operators' eyes: there's a lot of promise coupled with a failure to deliver. ARPU (average revenue per user) is much, much lower than operators had hoped. Young people go out, snap away with their phones and then send them to each others' devices via Bluetooth maybe, rather than spend 50p a pop to send them over their mobile network.

But the cameraphone may yet be about to have a renaissance as a public service tool. New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has announced a plan to let 911 and 311 (the city's non emergency number) lines accept incoming MMS and videos.

Such services aren't yet on the agenda for the UK's non-emergency number 101, although organisations this side of the pond are experimenting with what MMS can do.

Fareham Council, for instance, is asking locals to send pictures of graffiti and other urban irritations such as fly-tipping to a designated number for customer services who will then contact the relevant department to get it cleared up. So far, so good.

According to research by Gartner, half of mobiles sold these days have a camera included. Of what resolution we don't know but as cameraphones become truly ubiquitous it's time for some new applications to go with them.

Search, for example, could profit from this new-old channel. Say, I know a part in my washing machine needs replacing, I just don't know what it's called. If I could send an MMS of the part in question to the manufacturer to have a replacement sent out, that would be ideal.

Equally, harassed parents may welcome a service where they could MMS pictures of the goods their demanding bairns want for Christmas and get them identified by someone in the know. After all, to the non-tech savvy, all MP3 players can look the same. To children in the playground, they most certainly do not.

Insurance claims could also benefit from the use of MMS. Take a picture of your car at the scene of the accident, for example, and there's less need to rely on memory when staking a claim.

And how about asking emergency services to get involved in MMS? Maybe 911 operatives could send over a picture of the recovery position to those in situations where it's needed. Using MMS, those in accidents could transmit pictures of victims to help ambulance crews, or send videos of their location to help emergency workers track them down.

Police, too, could match up snaps sent in by members of the public of suspected stolen goods with a database of missing items.

And what of customer service? Tech support could offer help to customers via MMS or video. 'If you'd just like to look at the picture I've MMSed to you, Mr Jones, you can see exactly where your ANY key is... '

MMS may not be the cash cow it was initially painted as but it's almost certainly got a lot of life in it yet. Instead of only thinking 'consumer', maybe the mobile industry should realise MMS means business.