Generally, videos shot by a cameraphone aren't exactly Scorsese-worthy, though a company that designs digital-camera software wants to change that with a technology called Face Tracker. As you can probably guess, FotoNation's new trick enables your phone's camera to pick out faces in your shot and then finds the best settings for exposure, focus, and color balance — so the person you're targeting stays bright and clear in spite of your shaky hands. Face Tracker used to be available only on still cams, but the new version can track someone's mug while the your phone records video at 30 frames per second, keeping tabs on up to eight faces at the same time. Presumably if you have more than one face in the frame, Face Tracker finds the best compromise to keep each of them as in focus as possible. In that case, I hope it's defeatable, since I would think you'd want to focus on just one person in most shoots. At least that's what I hear the cool kids are doing. Anyway, if you're really, really good and eat all your sprouts, some cell-phone manufacturers may license the technology in the coming months. — Peter Pachal

FotoNation, via SlashPhone