So I’m sorting through the mail at work, when suddenly I find myself face to face with Albert Lai looking back at me from the cover of the June 18th, 2007 issue of Canadian Business. The article talks about Albert’s success as a startup entrepreneur and how he is heading down the road again, in what he envisions as web 3.0, bridging the gap between hardware devices and the web.

We’re already doing some of these things now, as we share our cell phone images and movies directly online. We just need to wait for the devices to catch up in quality and affordability. Having a camera in my cellphone definitely comes in handy, especially if I need a quick and dirty picture to post, but quality for an affordable price is not quite there yet.

There are also a slew of device on the market now that allow you to browse the web, such as the Internet Browser for the Nintendo DS, but this first attempt is still far from hitting the mark. And don’t even get me started about the outrageous cost of mobile data plans in Canada.

Ideally I would have a device, like an iPhone which would be able to speak with my Digital SLR via bluetooth, or whatever the wireless flavor of the month is. It would take that image and upload it for me to my blog or flickr account, without the use of a traditional computer. What would be even cooler is if there was a simple photo editting program that could adjust our images in the iPhone or the camera that would edit the photo to our liking before sending it. Perhaps via pre-programmed actions that you can load onto your device.

Basically, lets farm out all the cool things we can do via our computers and stick them into handheld devices that will do the work for us, from anywhere. Just imagine, the iPhone with photoshop preinstalled. iPhotoshop for iPhone perhaps. Maybe I should go and trademark that.

Do you ever run into the situation where you are not quite sure, when you took a picture? Perhaps you want to find out what exposure setting or ISO you used in a shot. In digital photography, you can usually find this out but checking the Exif data of a picture. Exif stands for Exchangeable image file format which is a standard in digital cameras that stores all the information pertaining to the image taken, such as camera specs, focal lengths, exposure settings, date, iso and more. Generally, you need to log into software such as photoshop in order to retrieve this data but wiseGeek has a online app which you can use to extract the data of images online or on your harddrive. My filing system is all date based, so finding out what date the image was taken is usually an easy way for me to track down the original file in my archives. (Thanks to Lindsay to sending in this great little link)