Cameras, ecommerce and machine learning

Mobile means that, for the first time, pretty much everyone on earth will have a camera, taking vastly more images than were ever taken on film ('How many pictures?'). This feels like a profound change on a par with, say, the transistor radio making music ubiquitous. Then, the image sensor in a phone is more than just a camera that takes pictures - it's also part of new ways of thinking about mobile UIs and services ('Imaging, Snapchat and mobile'), and part of a general shift in what a computer can do ('From mobile first to mobile native'). Meanwhile, image sensors are part of a flood of cheap commodity components coming out of the smartphone supply chain, that enable all kinds of other connected devices - everything from the Amazon Echo and Google Home to an August door lock or Snapchat Spectacles (and of course a botnet of hacked IoT devices). When combined with cloud services and, increasingly, machine learning, these are no longer just cameras or microphones but new endpoints or distribution for services - they're unbundled pieces of apps.