Almost one quarter of Scalado’s staff are mathematicians who know imaging inside out, and they need to. “The demands of VGA image processing are relatively modest,” says Mats. “So it is not too hard for a phone manufacturer to create an application which operates efficiently on today’s camera phones. The same is not true of mega pixel images; the processor and memory requirements start to grow very rapidly if you use conventional image manipulation techniques.”

Scalado’s technology grew out of applications for the web, its first product was a bandwidth efficient image zooming technology that has now been integrated as part of the MacroMedia Flash toolset. “When we first started we knew that imaging was going to be important on mobile phones,” says Mats. “But in many ways we were ahead of the market and I’m not sure that some of the manufacturers could see why you would want to do some of the things we were enabling, so initially we concentrated on web applications.”

Imaging has now become a central piece of smart and feature phone technology, indeed the camera phone market has grown bigger than that for stand alone digital cameras. As a result camera technology is rapidly moving from VGA to mega pixel resolutions. “While we originally applied our imaging technology to a number of different applications we realized that the demands of mega pixel would mean that manufactures would be looking for turn key solutions,” says Mats. “This realization led us to integrating our technology in the CAPS platform. We have a really deep knowledge of imaging and our software can process mega pixel images in real time on a smartphone using only a twelfth of the memory conventional application would use. Our code base is also very compact, we have seen competing solutions with SIS (Symbian OS install) files up to ten times larger than ours.”

The CAPS platform delivers a full set of imaging applications, consists of a camera application, image album, image editor and is supported by technology to transfer images to an online photo album.

As with many technology companies creating phone infrastructure components Scalado chose Symbian OS as the platform on which to implement CAPS. “One of the obvious advantages of Symbian OS is that it allows us to demonstrate our application on a phone rather than a PC emulator. Showing what the application can achieve this way has much more impact,” says Mats. However Scalado did not simply select Symbian OS for the ability to present their software. “We believe that Symbian OS version 8 is going to have a dramatic effect on the smartphone market,” says Mats. “Its real-time capability means that phones can be created with a single CPU; the reduction in manufacturing costs means that Symbian OS will become the OS of choice for phones in the mid market. It makes much better sense for manufacturers to use an open operating system so we anticipate a significant addressable market.”

Even so CAPS has been written as an operating system independent core and although Scalado itself does not plan to directly address the market for proprietary or other open platforms it is doing so through strategic alliances. The first of these is with Teleca, who also have a strong background in Symbian OS, who have integrated CAPS into the Obigo applications platform. This platform is designed to provide manufactures and OEMs with a complete set of imaging, browsing and messaging applications for feature phones based on chipsets from manufacturers including Infineon Comneon, Philips Semiconductor and QUALCOMM.

The CAPS platform is also open, exposing a comprehensive set of both low and high level APIs. While these exist primarily to allow licensees to access the camera features for product integration, they could also be made available to third party developers.

Another branch of Scalado’s imaging technology is retail applications. “The market for third party software for Symbian OS phones is still fairly small,” says Mats. “However it is important as it allows us to show off the capabilities of our technology to a wider audience.” PhotoFusion, which run on both UIQ and Series 60, includes capabilities to take zoomed photos, horizontal and vertical panoramas, create strips of images and warp the picture.

In the longer term Mats expects Scalado to concentrate increasingly on licensing technology to both manufacturers and third party developers.

The first third party licensee is Open Bit, which initially may seem an odd arrangement given that Open Bit already has a range of imaging applications – indeed their Photographer application includes several features similar to those in PhotoFusion. “We met with Open Bit at a Symbian event last year,” says Mats. “While several aspects of what we did were competitive we were wanting to concentrate on developing CAPS while Open Bit wanted to focus on their License Manger product, so we recognized the opportunity of working together.” Scalado and Open Bit are now working together on a number of customer projects and the next generation of Open Bit’s photographic applications will be based around CAPS technology.

Scalado is also looking to apply their technology to video. “We have some technology in research,” says Mats. “But there are already a number of players in the video market and there may be no market for another video decoder.”

Scalado is another example of how a small company with a technology edge can potentially reap large rewards from a market based on open platform technology such as Symbian OS. It is however perhaps slightly ironic that Scalado’s first implementation of CAPS components, while with a Symbian OS licensee, is for a proprietary operating system on the Sony Ericsson K700.

More information on PhotoFusion is available from Scalado's Web site and PhotoFusion can be purchase from Handango for Series 60 and UIQ, fully functional trials (which stamp Scalado on any captured images until the application is registered) are also available.

Web: www.scalado.com.