I’ve been hearing a lot about Pierre Lams and his company, Handheld PCs. They offer a service by the name of Hand-e-Pix. And it’s a piece of genius. It enables mobile device photography to be timestamped and geolocated and managed securely using an organisation’s Active Directory policies. So organisations like Police forces, local councils, traffic wardens, civil engineering firms and so on — they can now enable their people to use the cameras on their corporate handsets. The implications of this are vast.

If you are a Police Officer, Pierre was telling me, then you’ll most probably be given a BlackBerry device (by many forces across the UK). The problem is — of course — the camera (and an array of other functions are switched off by default). If an officer takes a photo on his BlackBerry and mails it via Yahoo Mail to the local Crown Court — is that admissible in evidence? If he mails the photo via the Police email system, is that still admissible?

There’s a whole load of implications. What Hand-e-Pix does is sit in the middle. When the Police Officer runs the application, he or she *IS* able to access the camera. Images are timestamped and geolocated and transmitted securely via the Hand-e-Pix app to the Force’s evidence database. So all of a sudden, officers can actually use the technology in their hands.

Have a watch of the video and see what you think. You can find Pierre at http://www.handheld-pcs.com/handheld/h/Home//21/.