In April of 2004, a small group of computer programmers and technologists pitched investors on a piece of software

that they were working on that they believed had the potential to allow digital cameras to become

smarter in the sense that they would be, to quote, one of the members of that group doing the

pitching, more aware of their owners' location and preferences.

They later realized, though, that the addressable market of digital camera users wasn't sufficient to give them the scale they would require to make their concept a viable business model,

and thus they turned their attentions toward the budding world of telephone handsets of mobile phones.

At the time, the world of mobile phone operating systems was dominated by two main players,

Symbion and Windows Mobile.

Windows Mobile was released by Microsoft in the year 2000, under the moniker Pocket PC 2000,

but was re-dubbed Windows Mobile in 2003, available in several

different flavors, different paid membership levels, basically, similar to how its main project,

Windows, was sold to personal computer users. Symbion, though, was the far more popular

mobile operating system of the two, used in phones and

similar products made by Samsung, Motorola, Sony Erickson, Nokia, Fujitsu, Sharp, and Mitsubishi,

and it began its life in the 1990s under the name Epoch 32, before being rebranded as part of a business

restructuring. The company that created it, a business computer company called Cyan Software, became

Symbian Limited, as part of a partnership between the folks at Cyan and the folks at Nokia,

Erickson, Motorola, and Sony.

The purpose of this merger was to take advantage of these respective companies' advantages,

as PDA's personal digital assistants merged with mobile phones. They essentially wanted to

define what came next, and they wanted to do so quickly to prevent Microsoft the omnipotent

villain in many technologists' stories at this point in history,

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