France Telecom Offers Holidaymakers Other People's Photos

from the you-can't-be-serious? dept

Derek writes "France Telecom R&D has enabled a service to let people on vacation build an on-line photo album as they travel by using SMS. To do so, FT has assigned specific identifier SMS quick codes to about 150 monuments and vistas in the South of France, and travelers enter the correct code when they arrive at a given monument. The service then uploads a photo of the monument to your "personal" vacation website. However, the photos are not personal, but are archive photos from FT taken much earlier. In the age of mobile blogging and camera-handsets, FT could have done a lot better. Perhaps the service will succeed - people have been buying picture frames with included pictures of someone else's family for years." I guess it's kind of like buying postcards from various locations and pretending you took the pictures yourself.
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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2003 @ 3:03pm

    Viva la France

    Wow, their R&D department came up with this? Must have taken all the brain power of France to sell you archived photos of where you happen to be.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Beck, 28 Jul 2003 @ 8:47pm

    Old-Time Slides

    Back when people used to develop their film as slides instead of photos you could go into the gift shop at a tourist attraction and buy slides to add to your slide show as if you took the photos yourself.

    Is this prior art?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2003 @ 9:07pm

    Won't it harm their economy?

    If France had no tourism, they'd be about as well off as Senegal.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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