At this point, it’s already clear that the iPhone has become the camera many people use on a daily basis. The iPhone 4 is now by far the most popular camera on Flickr (and that’s true even though it’s being undercounted — likely drastically). And apps like Instagram, Hipstamatic, and Camera+ are exploding in usage, despite being iPhone-only. But some upcoming changes in iOS 5 point to an even brighter future for the iPhone as a camera. We’re likely to see an explosion of photo apps as a result.

Specifically, iOS 5 will include Core Image. This was previously announced at WWDC, but the current beta builds going around now point in the direction of what this should mean. With the latest beta (version 5), a ton of effects have been added. Last week, BGR posted the iOS 5 beta 5 changelog. Among the bullet points:

Several filters have been added since beta 1. The current list now includes the following filters: CIAdditionCompositing, CIAffineTransform, CICheckerboardGenerator, CIColorBlendMode, CIColorBurnBlendMode, CIColorControls, CIColorCube, CIColorDodgeBlendMode, CIColorInvert,CIColorMatrix, CIColorMonochrome, CIConstantColorGenerator, CICrop, CIDarkenBlendMode, CIDifferenceBlendMode, CIExclusionBlendMode, CIExposureAdjust, CIFalseColor, CIGammaAdjust,CIGaussianGradient, CIHardLightBlendMode, CIHighlightShadowAdjust, CIHueAdjust, CIHueBlendMode, CILightenBlendMode, CILinearGradient, CILuminosityBlendMode,CIMaximumCompositing, CIMinimumCompositing, CIMultiplyBlendMode, CIMultiplyCompositing, CIOverlayBlendMode, CIRadialGradient, CISaturationBlendMode, CIScreenBlendMode,CISepiaTone, CISoftLightBlendMode, CISourceAtopCompositing, CISourceInCompositing, CISourceOutCompositing, CISourceOverCompositing, CIStraightenFilter, CIStripesGenerator,CITemperatureAndTint, CIToneCurve, CIVibrance, CIVignette, and CIWhitePointAdjust.

“CI” obviously stands for “Core Image” and the part after that explains what many of the effects mean and/or do. All iOS 5 developers will now have access to many of these advanced tools. Simply put, it should make image/photo processing much simpler to implement and execute.

Previously, developers had to use the weaker Core Graphics to manipulate images on the iPhone. Or they had to jerry-rig their own solutions to tap into something like OpenGL for more powerful functionality. While filters may seem like a simple feature, they’re not easy to create from scratch. iOS 5 will now give developers built-in options and a base so they no longer have to create from scratch.

These Core Image options will also significantly speed up image processing for many of the apps out there already using some filters. The reason is that it gives developers easier access to OpenGL, which is what developers currently use for things like video game graphic rendering — it’s significantly more powerful than Core Graphics, but harder to access.

Does the mean the end of Instagram, Path, Camera+ and the like? No, those guys will likely continue to operate on the more advanced end of the spectrum. Camera+’s “Clarity” filter, for example, is likely far beyond what iOS 5 will offer out of the box. But it will be another step towards the commoditization of filters as a whole. If an app has camera functionality, many more will now likely include them because, why not?

You’ll also likely see more apps that focus on video as a result of these additions to iOS. And there should be many more that focus on “crazy” photo effects.

Of course, the next iPhone itself may have an even bigger impact in the space. Rumored to have an 8 megapixel camera with a new sensor, the device will also likely be much faster when it comes to processing power. Combine this with the changes in iOS 5 and we’re likely going to see another leap forward in mobile photography.

And don’t forget the largest player in the photo space, Facebook. Work continues on their next app geared more towards photography. Meanwhile, Google appears to be attacking the space from a number of angles. And support for Tweeting pictures will now be fully baked into iOS itself.

A new display technology called i2R e-paper is making the rounds today. It’s developed by ITRI, a Taiwanese research company that has produced flexible AMOLED and LCD displays in the past. i2R is essentially a plastic substrate with a heat-activated liquid crystal coating: you pass it through a thermal printer and a 300dpi monochrome image is impressed on its surface — until you want to rewrite it, which you can do up to 260 times by their calculations.

Putting aside the obvious comparisons to, say, using a pencil, I’m not sure this technology is the paper-killer ITRI and some sites think it is. I have several issues with the technology:

-The display is advertised as not consuming electricity. That’s something that can be said of any bistable display — e-ink is the same way, and once made to display something, it will display it without using electricity as long as it isn’t interfered with. And i2R may not require electricity (to be specific, it has no underlying circuitry, making it a closer analog to paper), but its thermal printing device certainly does. Essentially, it requires electricity in the same way e-ink does: to change what is displayed. Presumably the crystals wear out after a time, however, limiting the rewrites.

-Heat activation limits the ways in which people can interact with these displays. The advantages of a circuit-capable substrate is the ability to include sensors such as IR or resistive touch arrays, allowing for people to write on or “click” content. Obviously the point here isn’t interactive content but reusable displays, but the gains are questionable.

-No attached memory means changing what’s on the display/paper is an involved process of feeding it through its special writer. Doing this with dozens of i2R displays doesn’t look like anything a shopkeeper would want to do.

-I’m not sure which is worse for the environment: 260 pieces of A4 being recycled, or one A4-sized piece of plastic that isn’t being recycled (I doubt the crystal coating can be removed well enough to reprocess the substrate).

-It’s glossy!

On the plus side, $2 per A4 sheet is cheap compared with other display technologies; A 6″ e-ink display costs $60 or so. Obviously you won’t be plastering your walls with Kindles. And 300dpi is enough to get some very detailed graphics or codes on there.

While I’m skeptical, I think the issue is simply that ITRI (and Reuters) are overselling it. This isn’t a wholesale replacement for paper, or e-ink for that matter: it’s a niche technology that can and should be applied in an institutional way. Think bus passes, temporary ID cards, class handouts, the sort of things that need to be rewritten semi-frequently from a central source but are mostly interacted with as static pieces of information. A “For sale!” sign isn’t the right application for this technology, and more traditional “displays” like whiteboards are also safe.

Watch Reuters’s video here. I don’t think this is the narrator’s beat, though. “It doesn’t require a backlight to print,” indeed.

Less than two weeks ago, red-hot startup Airbnb got rocked by a wave of negative press after one of its guests blogged about the traumatizing experience of coming home to her apartment to find it utterly wrecked by a guest.

Airbnb’s initial response was lackluster at best. But after a couple of false starts, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wrote an unconditional apology that reaffirmed that the company understood the concerns and was going to do everything it could to make things right. He promised a $50,000 insurance guarantee for hosts, as well as additional safety features that were on the way. And a week after that apology, we’re seeing the fruits of their efforts.

Today Airbnb has announced a new 24-hour support hotline, giving users a safety net in case something goes wrong. The logistics and personnel required to staff the line would have been too costly for a scrappy startup, but the extremely well-funded company can afford it, and this will do a lot to help reassure customers.

Another important new feature to help boost safety is VoiceConnect, which now allows hosts to call potential guests to do a quick screen, without revealing their phone numbers. This works a bit like Google Voice — you initiate the call using the web interface, then immediately get a phone call from Airbnb, which routes you to the potential guest’s line. Calls are recorded by Airbnb for security purposes.

Next is an improved references system. This has been around for a while (as ‘recommendations’), but Airbnb now has better integration with Facebook that makes it easier for  users to build up their reputation even before they’ve received reviews from other Airbnb users. And that’s important, because the service is young enough that many users are trying it out for the first time. Another addition: there are now video profiles — currently for hosts only — that let hosts create a video that’s shared as part of their listing.

These launches come on the heels of a series of other safety features that have rolled out over the course of the last week. These include member verification (you can validate your profile by connecting it to third-party services like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and an integrated ‘photobooth’ feature that makes it easier for members to take a snapshot of themselves (and gives them less of an excuse not to have one).

Finally, in a blog post on August 5, Airbnb announced that it was using a tool on its new safety site that allows the community to vote on the changes it wants most. Less than five days after releasing that tool, Airbnb implemented the top two requests: it now allows hosts to mandate that all potential guests have a profile photo, and hosts can now decline reservations without that impacting where their space will appear in search results. The post explains that while it’s been possible to decline reservations before now, your results ranking would be negatively impacted if you rejected a reservation.

With companies chomping at the bit to enter the growing mobile space and take advantage of the opportunities therein, it’s almost more intriguing to explore why some companies don’t throw their hats in the ring. Case in point: AMD — the second largest x86 processor manufacturer in the world has yet to make their play. Why haven’t they made their push into mobile, just like everyone else?

Well, if AMD SVP Rick Bergman is to be believed, it’s because they believe their true strengths lie elsewhere. Rather than try and force their way into an already crowded market, Bergman said AMD has “other areas it can focus on in order to grow.”

Perhaps it’s a smart move for the perennial also-ran of the x86 processor race. ARM has already carried off the lion’s share of the mobile processor market, striking lucrative licensing agreements with companies like LG and Texas Instruments, meaning their processors now power a huge number of mobile devices. If AMD really wanted to compete, it would require a little bit of luck and a lot of cooperation — either with Intel to combat ARM’s stranglehold on the market, or with ARM to one-up their longtime rival. Neither of those options probably sounded very appealing.

For AMD, the future largely remains in their traditional desktop, server, and notebook offerings, but the higher-ups have set their sights on another booming market: tablets. Their Z-series processor, launched back in June, was AMD’s first step into tablet computing. While it hasn’t popped up in any must-have tablets yet, AMD remains hopeful that their graphics and processor technologies will align with the growing performance and battery needs of tablet customers. Their rival in graphics, Nvidia, thinks the same, however, and has an ambitious roadmap as well.

So is that it for them? Have they decided to watch the smartphone wars unfold from the sidelines? Not exactly: Mr. Bergman hinted that they may make a move “if the right circumstances come up and we can see a way to impact the market.” We’ll see if that conservative strategy pans out, but as my old Latin teacher used to say, “fortes fortuna adiuvat.”

Launching in beta today in California is the YC-funded Leaky. Like a Hipmunk for car insurance, Leaky’s premise is simple enough; visit the site and you’ll be prompted to fill out an online questionnaire covering all sorts of vehicle-related questions like make, model and mileage of your car as well as demographic information like education level and employer. When you complete the quiz, Leaky immediately serves up a selection of car insurance quotes from five of the top insurance carriers as well as others, including Geico, Esurance and Allstate.

While individual car insurance providers already have the “fill out questionnaire” -> “get quote” functionality on their individual sites, no one in the US is aggregating realtime quotes from multiple providers like Leaky is. And unlike UK counterparts Moneysupermarket.com and Confused.com, where regulations are relatively uniform, Leaky has the added challenge of insurance restrictions being different for each individual insurance companies across all 50 states.

“Insurance companies each have a different perspective how much money you’re going to cost the company,” co-founder Darren Nix tells me “Depending on a customer’s claims history different companies have different philosophies on how to underwrite risk for different customers and each database has different pricing models.”

Basically this means that Leaky has to crawl the APIs for five or more insurance carriers, for the fields corresponding to the answers to 40 questions, across 50 states. “When we first started writing code in January we thought it would take a couple of months, then we realized it was a beast,” co-founder Jason Traff says.

Indeed, many in the insurance sector purport themselves to do exactly what Leaky actually does (which is hard) but instead incorporate some cop-out lead gen or spammy element. Traff explains that Progressive just estimates what your car insurance quote would be based on publicly available data. And services like Netquote.com, Carinsurance.com and Insurance.com have you fill out a questionnaire but do not result in online quotes, rather in a series of sales phone calls over the next couple of days. Sounds horrific.

Free for users, Leaky plans on monetizing by charging affiliate fees for every customer it brings to insurance companies. Nix and Traff tell me that they estimate they’ve saved the 700 people who’ve signed up an average of $313 a year. They estimate the size of the auto-insurance premium market to be $200 billion annually, $20 billion of which results from carrier switching.

So if it’s actually saving people money and has the potential for profit, why the name Leaky? Nix says, “Well most people find insurance really boring and we wanted a domain name to make people think ‘What the hell? How’s that related to insurance?’ And as it turns out, it’s working because we are having outstanding recall of our domain name!” The founders expect to have expand to all insurance companies across all states in the next 60 days.

By now, we’ve all seen behind-the-scenes footage of motion capture in action — an actor clad in a monochrome jumpsuit and the occasional handful of colored balls, spouting off dialogue and gesticulating wildly. It used to be that such work could only be done within the confines of a studio, a closed space where a camera would have as little trouble as possible picking up those little points of articulation, in hopes of translating them into lifelike movement for a CGI bobcat or something. Now, according to Disney Research Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, a recent breakthrough will allow mocap to take place just about anywhere.

The big idea? Instead of actors being filmed by cameras, the actors wear the cameras.

By attaching about 2 dozen tiny cameras to actors’ bodies, filmmakers will be able to capture movement that may not be feasible in enclosed spaces. Imagine a long, drawn-out chase scene: instead of having multiple takes of a guy jumping over a trashcan and leaping for a fire escape being stitched together, the body-mounted system could record all the video data needed in one go.

The technique, called “Structure from Motion”, isn’t quite there yet though. It hinges on precise placement of those cameras on the body, which are then calibrated with external reference structures. Once the video data is collected, it’s all processed to create a moving skeletal structure that replicates the wearer’s movements, but it comes at a cost. It requires a considerable amount of computing power to produce the finished product, and at this point a minute of footage may require up to a full day of rendering.

Takaaki Shiratori, a post-doc associate presenting the technique at SIGGRAPH 2011, says “anyone will be able to do motion capture in the not-so-distant future.” A bold claim, to be sure, but where’s the fun in innovation if you can’t wildly speculate about the future?

Given the type of equipment involved, we may even see homegrown mocap sooner than we think. GoPro cameras, while not cheap, perform impressively when mounted on the end of a sword or a hula hoop, so what’s to stop an impressionable young filmmaker with a credit card from buying a ton and strapping them to his or her body? The software required would be a stumbling block for sure, but if it happened to go open-source, just imagine what some imaginative up-and-comer could do.

As an intelligent TechCrunch reader with the gift of foresight, you’ve probably backed up your hard drive — and all of the precious photos locked inside — to at least one cloud service, just in case the unthinkable happens and you lose both your computer and your local backup.

But you’re unusual. Many of your friends probably haven’t backed up their photos at all, which means they’re one crashed drive away from losing those memories forever. And even if that drive doesn’t crash, their photos are likely buried in several layers of folders where they’re gathering a thick coat of digital dust.

Snapjoy, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today, wants to fix that: they’re offering to keep your photos backed up and organized automatically. And they’re taking on the likes of Flickr, iPhoto, and Picasa as they hope to become your go-to app for photo management.

The web-based service, which launches today to the public, looks nice — you can try a live demo right here. After uploading some photos (a process which Snapjoy says is significantly faster than some competitors) the app categorizes your photos for you, using metadata to try to intelligently place the correct photos in each album.

Unfortunately the service doesn’t pay attention to any albums you’ve already created using apps like iPhoto, which could frustrate some users. But Cofounder Michael Dwan says that most users typically sort their photos into albums that are similar to the ones Snapjoy creates (arranged primarily by date) — or they haven’t created albums at all, in which case Snapjoy is a big improvement. Another nifty feature: if you upload the same photo multiple times (which is easy to do if your photos aren’t very organized), Snapjoy will ignore the duplicates.

If you’re on a Mac you can download Shoebox, a native client that makes it easy to drag and drop photos to automatically upload them to the service (it will also detect when you’ve inserted an SD card, so you can quickly upload new photos).  Dwan says that the company has more native applications in the works, including an uploader for Windows and an iPad app.

By default, everything uploaded to Snapjoy is private — the site is looking to become the repository for all of your photos, after all. But you can still share photos with select groups of friends, and if you grant permission, a friend can actually copy one of your photos into their own Snapjoy album (a feature that will come in handy when you’ve, say, gone on a trip with some friends). Down the line Dwan says that the site will add more social network functionality for those who want it (like Facebook integration), but it will still keep the default private.

Of course, Snapjoy is still a nascent two-person startup, and there’s no way of knowing whether it’ll be around in a few years — which is key if you’re using it for backup purposes. Dwan says that the company knows it still has to prove itself, and that users will also be able to download full archives of their photos (at the resolution they were originally uploaded them) whenever they’d like.

The service is initially free of charge for everyone. In the near future it will begin charging for users that upload a lot of photos (more than a few gigs), though it will be inexpensive, on the order of a few dollars per month.

Twitter’s redesigned and feature-rich web interface (a.k.a. #newTwitter), which was announced last fall, has been completely rolled out, according to a company Tweet. That means that Twitter users can no longer use the old version of the site, which has been the case for nearly a year.

You can access more information about #NewTwitter here. Of course, this means that all Twitter.com users will be using the same application, which is sure to make things a bit easier for Twitter when it comes to feature and design rollouts.

The company also released an HTML5 version of Twitter.com for the iPad.

In a post on their Mobile Blog (since removed), Google today announced an update to its Google Search app for Android, bringing a few new features that should improve your overall search experience. None of them will change your life, but since we know what to look forward to, we might as well look forward to it, am I right?

The update will group suggestions by type, with the web suggestions appearing up top. Travelers, nomads, and peeps outside of the States will also get to see country-specific suggestions and search results as long as they’re in a country with a Google domain. Another fun feature is the ability to remove history items by performing a long press, and we all know there’s nothing more embarrassing than having an awkward search history. Have you ever been the only one in your group of friends with a decent smartphone? If you have, you already know how handy this feature will be.

Google included a couple helpful tips for using the app, one of which we found to be pretty exciting. Some of you may have already discovered this, but there just so happens to be a way to search through other apps on the phone using the Google Search app. All you have to do is go into the settings section of the app and check out “searchable items.”

The app has also undergone a little makeover, now sporting a new, smoother user interface. Within the UI, users can tap the arrow to the right of a search suggestion or history item to make a quick change before searching.

Google has removed the post (which you can peep here in screen grab form), and there’s no telling when these features will roll out, but at least we know what to expect.

In a post on their Mobile Blog (since removed), Google today announced an update to its Google Search app for Android, bringing a few new features that should improve your overall search experience. None of them will change your life, but since we know what to look forward to, we might as well look forward to it, am I right?

The update will group suggestions by type, with the web suggestions appearing up top. Travelers, nomads, and peeps outside of the States will also get to see country-specific suggestions and search results as long as they’re in a country with a Google domain. Another fun feature is the ability to remove history items by performing a long press, and we all know there’s nothing more embarrassing than having an awkward search history. Have you ever been the only one in your group of friends with a decent smartphone? If you have, you already know how handy this feature will be.

Google included a couple helpful tips for using the app, one of which we found to be pretty exciting. Some of you may have already discovered this, but there just so happens to be a way to search through other apps on the phone using the Google Search app. All you have to do is go into the settings section of the app and check out “searchable items.”

The app has also undergone a little makeover, now sporting a new, smoother user interface. Within the UI, users can tap the arrow to the right of a search suggestion or history item to make a quick change before searching.

Google has removed the post (which you can peep here in screen grab form), and there’s no telling when these features will roll out, but at least we know what to expect.