One of Symbian’s key goals is to achieve a broad diversity of contributors, and we’ve already been making great progress with this (see for example this post).  So it is with great excitement that I can announce another contributor – this time ISB, who are contributing a reference ECAM implementation (ECAM is the name of the camera API in Symbian).

Symbian veterans will know that ECAM has always been an area in which handset vendors traditionally differentiated, which meant they made their own camera implementations since each differed greatly.  This is good for competition, but prevented developers from working with camera-based use-cases in generic reference environments – in other words, you needed a real phone in order to experiment with video recording and image capture, since the core platform did not implement these.

The ISB contribution will initially target the QEMU environment, and will enable camera use-cases (both image capture and video recording) via a standard PC web-cam.  Eventually we’d like to target other reference environments too, particularly Beagleboard, so stay tuned for updates there.

I’ll be making a short post exploring more of the technical aspects to this contribution on my multimedia blog, but here I thought it would be useful to hear about ISB’s motivation.  So I caught up with Shohei Yoshida, Senior Manager of ISB, to ask him a few questions:

What are ISB’s main business areas?

“Our main business is software development including engineering services (about 85% of our sales).  We focus on mobile (mobile accounts for about 56% of total sales), including mobile devices, infrastructure development and verification services.”

Why is the ECAM contribution important?

“Mobile phones and smartphones include camera and manifold functions. The current architecture of the Symbian Platform provides the ECAM API definition only. It is necessary to support a number of use cases and provide a complete test reference.”

Who will benefit from the contribution?

“Application developers, camera HW providers, handset manufacturers and software developers who use camera functionality.”

Why did ISB volunteer to contribute ECAM? (in other words, what is the business value to ISB?)

“We have three reasons. One is to raise the company’s profile. By publishing ECAM source code for this contribution, our Symbian Platform expertise and high-level engineering can be proven and promoted to the Japanese market as well as global markets. In addition, if we get opportunities to introduce this contribution in Symbian Foundation events, we can grow our business and earn more profits.

Another is to promote our vertical integration business of functionalities and applications using the camera. There are numerous applications and functionalities for smartphones such as AR, video phone and camcorder. ISB can develop a business of a vertical integration of applications, middleware and drivers by developing applications using the camera and/or collaborating with other application and functionality providers. In Japan there are many companies that own camera engine chips and CODECs. So, we could make a large profit by providing consultancy/technologies to help these companies in enabling their chips/CODECs to be supported on Symbian.

The other is to aim ISB’s Symbian distribution. We are currently planning distribution of the Symbian Platform. This is intended to make a profit by porting Japanese advanced technologies onto the Symbian Platform and providing carriers, semiconductors, manufacturers and application developers with a Japanese version of the SDK on which Japanese language functionalities are added. So ISB has skills in functionalities beyond just those related to the camera.”