Waleli develops crime-fighting camera phone technology

Waleli, an Amsterdam-based wireless innovation company, is developing new technology to allow camera-phone users to contribute to the fight against crime.

The new application, MMS-witness, uses picture messaging (MMS) to help catch criminals. The technology allows digital images and videos to be forwarded to a central police database.

The technology allows images and videos sent in by the public to be stored on the database and sent to mobile phones or PDAs of police officers on the street to help increase the chances of a successful arrest.

The application is still in the early stages of development and is being tested with police in Amsterdam. At present the police themselves are taking the photographs and storing them in a database.

The company hopes to establish a countrywide phone number for each European country, which could be used to send footage or pictures of a crime, or potential crime. This would be a memorable number such as 999 or 112.