Japan's massive earthquake has affected the production and distribution of an important component in many cellphone cameras, the CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) image sensor, from Sony and Toshiba.

Toshiba's Image Sensor fabrication facility in Iwate, Japan, has been shut down because of the earthquake from which much of Japan is still working to recover, according to the technology research firm IHS iSuppli. Toshiba's Iwate plant manufactures logic chips and CMOS sensors for cellphone cameras.

Sony, on the other hand, has had to delay the delivery of its CMOS sensors to cellphone manufacturers, IHS iSuppli said in a report issued Thursday morning.

IHS iSuppli did not have information on how long Toshiba's plant would be closed or how long Sony's sensor deliveries would be backed up and officials at both consumer electronics companies were not available Thursday morning to comment on the firm's report.

In 2010, Toshiba was the fifth-largest supplier of image sensors for phones with an about 12% share of worldwide revenue, according to an estimate from IHS iSuppli. Last year, Sony came in sixth with about 8% share of the global market for image sensors, the research firm said.

Combined, Toshiba and Sony made up about 20% of the cellphone image sensor market in terms of revenue, IHS iSuppli said.

"With [its] low cost and easy integration with other electronics, CMOs has long been the technology of choice for cellphone cameras," said Pamela Tufegdzic, an IHS analyst, in a statement. "The Japan earthquake and subsequent logistical challenges have disrupted a portion of the supply of this key component."

IHS iSuppli said that a replacement part, albeit a higher-end option, is available in the form of another image sensor technology called CCD (charge-coupled device), which has been unaffected so far.

Sony and Toshiba are major CCD suppliers, as are Japanese competitors Fujifilm, Panasonic and Sharp, the firm said.

"Because of their higher image quality, CCDs are commonly employed in digital still cameras," IHS iSuppli said in a statement. "In contrast, CMOS sensors predominately are used in cellphones and often in other devices where the camera is secondary to other functions."

Digital camera manufacturers Altek and Ability Enterprise, both based in Taiwan and both of which make cameras for major Japanese brands, told IHS iSuppli that they have yet to see any decrease in CCD supply from Japan.

Ability receives about 90% of its CCDs from Sony and Altek buys about 70% to 80% of its CCDs from Sharp, IHS iSuppli said.

"Sharp's CCD plants in Japan are far from the worst-hit zones, while Sony's CCD plants are located in Thailand," the research firm said."Because of this, CCD supply in the future should not face any immediate supply issues. The situation may change over the long term, however, as CCD makers could experience challenges with their own upstream material suppliers and encounter problems with transportation and power."

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Photo: A Sony logo is displayed at an electronics shop in Tokyo. In the wake of Japan's earthquake, Sony has had to delay the delivery of one type of cellphone camera sensor to manufacturers. Credit: Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

Microsoft is taking Streetside, it's rival to Google's Street View, to the streets of Europe.

According to the BBC, cars fitted with 360-degree panoramic cameras have hit boulevards, roads and avenues in London, snapping scenes to be used in Microsoft's Bing Maps, which competes with Google Maps.

And Microsoft is planning to map out images of other roadways in other English cities and European countries next month, the BBC said.

No date was offered as to when Streetside scenes would go live for Europe on Bing Maps, and Microsoft officials were not available for comment on Wednesday morning.

Streetside is already available in most major U.S. cities and is an effort Microsoft is continuing to expand in America as well.

Google's Street View efforts have run into a bit of trouble due to the wrongful collection of private data from unsecured W-Fi networks while its photo-taking cars and bikes cruised around the U.S. and Europe over the last few years.

Last week a Swiss court ruled that Google must guarantee that faces and license plates are unrecognizable before publishing street scenes from Switzerland in its Street View maps. Google said it was considering its appeal options for the court order.

Last month Google was fined 100,000 euros by France for improperly gathering and storing data collected by its Street View cars and bicycles.

Google has apologized for wrongfully collecting Wi-Fi data with its Street View vehicles multiple times over the last few months and promised to delete the data it has collected.

It may then come as not much of a surprise that Microsoft is saying it won't make the same errors when collecting Wi-Fi data on its Streetside routes, which will be less ambitious than Google's Street View routes, for now.

"We're not setting out to record every street. We believe it is most valuable in urban centres where people want to find services," Dave Coplin, Microsoft Corp.'s director of search, told the BBC.

Microsoft is collecting some Wi-Fi data, which will be used to pair Streetside with "location-based services," Coplin told the BBC.

Among the data being collected while snapping photos will be the "unique number that identifies the location of a hot spot," along with the hot spot's signal strength and what type of Wi-Fi signal is being used, the BBC said.

But, while Microsoft has already taken some Streetside photos, it has so far collected no Wi-Fi data, the report said.

"We took the decision to postpone Wi-Fi data collection," Coplin told the BBC. "We'd like to do it the right way."

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Image: A screenshot of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles as depicted on Microsoft's Streetside view on Bing Maps. Credit: Microsoft Corp.

Instagram, the photo editing and sharing startup that launched just four months ago, now has more than 1.7 million users and $7 million from Benchmark Capital.

The company behind the popular iPhone app started out “scrappy, humble and agile,” wrote chief executive Kevin Systrom in a blog post Wednesday. Now, with the help of Facebook alum and Benchmark general partner Matt Cohler, it has a hefty hunk of financing that it plans to use building an engineering team.

With nearly 300,000 photos posted daily, Instagram has also attracted support from bold-name angel investors Adam D’Angelo (co-founder of Quora and former chief technology officer at Facebook) and Jack Dorsey (chief executive of Square and Twitter co-founder).

The mobile photo space is a hopping these days. Path, a similar sharing service, said Tuesday that it raised $8.5 million from Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures.

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Flickr user Mirco Wilhelm says he lost 4,000 photos -- five years' worth of images -- due to a mistake on the part of a staffer at the popular picture hosting site.

Wilhelm, an IT architect and photographer, wrote about the ordeal in a Tumblr blog post with a title that we can't republish here on the Technology blog.

In the post, he said: "I was a bit surprised when trying to log into my Flickr account. It didn't remember I was logged in, but asked me for my password, knowing who I am. Then I was asked to 'create' a Flickr account.

"Strange, because I already had an account … for the last 5 years with about 4000 pictures in it."

Wilhelm said this brought to mind that he had reported a user account to Flickr that had added him as a contact on Sunday that contained stolen images.

"I checked the email I received from the Flickr staff," Wilhelm wrote in his post. "It only stated, that the account will be checked for irregulations, so I asked if they, by mistake had deleted my account.

"Well, it turned out, they actually had."

Flickr, and its parent company, Yahoo, were unavailable for comment Tuesday.

Wilhelm, however, posted a response he said he got from Flickr:

Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error and hope that this mistake can be reconciled. Here is what I can do from here:

I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos. I know that there is a lot of history on your account—again, please accept my apology for my negligence. Once I restore your account, I will add four years of free Pro to make up for my error.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

Again, I am deeply sorry for this mistake.

Regards,

Flickr staff

About three hours later, Wilhelm added another post to his blog, stating that Flickr had contacted him again and was working to help him out a bit.

Wilhelm said Yahoo e-mailed him with this:

I can definitely get you logged back in to your account.

However, we are taking a look to see if there is anything we can do in this particular case to restore your content.

While we investigate this we need the account to not be touched. As soon as I have any further information, I'll get back to you.

This might be a good reminder to those living in the cloud and not backing up important data, photos, documents and all the other things users store online -- saving important digital files on a portable hard drive, or two, isn't a bad idea.

A shout-out goes to Adrianne Jeffries at The New York Observer, who first reported this Flickr fumble.

[Updated 11:13 p.m.: Yahoo spokesman Jason Khoury sent along this statement to the Technology blog in an e-mail:

Yesterday, Flickr inadvertently deleted a member’s account. Flickr takes user trust very seriously and we, like our users, take great pride in being able to take, post and share photos. Our teams are currently working hard to try to restore the contents of this user's account. We are working on a process that would allow us to easily restore deleted accounts and we plan on rolling this functionality out soon.]

[Updated Wednesday 2:54 p.m.: Mirco Wilhelm, left a comment on this post, notifying the Technology blog and its readers that his Flickr account is restored. Wilhelm said:

Just to sum some things up. My Flickr account has been restored through some magical "we don't have it" recovery procedure. The problem I had with this case was not the loss of my photos on Flickr. I only use Flickr as a community and showcase platform with downscaled versions of my images. What I lost was 5 years of community membership, contact, comments, internal and external links to my photos. This is the part of Flickr that's hard to keep on a local backup and the hardest to recreate.]

[Updated Wednesday 6:05 p.m.: Yahoo spokesman Jason Khoury e-mailed this statement:

Yahoo! is pleased to share that the Flickr team has fully restored a member’s account that was mistakenly deleted yesterday. We regret the human error that led to the mistake and have worked hard to rectify the situation, including reloading the entire photo portfolio and providing the member with 25 years of free Flickr Pro membership. Flickr takes the trust of our members very seriously and we appreciate the patience shown by this member and our community. Flickr will also soon roll out functionality that will allow us to restore deleted accounts more easily in the future.]

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Photo: Mirco Wilhelm's Twitter profile picture. Credit: Mirco Wilhelm / Twitter

Chen Weiwei, also known as the Running Naked Man, has become a viral sensation in China after stripping down to his underwear out of frustration with the nation's railway system that has left many unable to travel during the country's Spring Festival holiday.

David Pierson, a Times reporter based in China, provided a report of Weiwei's exploits, the public support for his actions, and the fiasco it's created for the government over on our sister blog, Money & Company.

Pierson reported:

Chen's unlikely saga started last Tuesday when he couldn't buy tickets home despite waiting in line 14 hours at the west Jinhua railway station in China's eastern Zhejiang province.

Though he stood only third from the front of the line, Chen complained people cut in front of him, costing him his chance at the few tickets available to his hometown in central Henan province, 15 hours away by train.

With nothing left to do, Chen ripped off his clothes down to his underwear, shoes and socks and stormed into the station master's office looking for an explanation.

A photographer for a state news service captured the moment in the office, snapping pictures of a doughy Chen in tight boxer briefs next to a poker-faced rail official smoking a cigarette and writing a text on his cellphone.

The photos of Chen quickly went viral, with Internet-users nicknaming him the "running naked man" and calling him a hero for standing up to the state's rail monopoly.

"Running naked didn't put shame on you," said one Web post addressed to Chen on the popular portal Sohu.com. "It put shame on the system."

To read Pierson's full-story on Weiwei, the Running Naked Man, read his Money & Company post, Unable to get train ticket, man strips in frustration, becomes Chinese Internet sensation.

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Image: A screenshot of Chen Weiwei in a Chinese railway official's office, posted online. Credit: news.163.com

With restrictions lifted on exporting Internet services and software to Iran, Google will begin offering mapping program Google Earth, photo management service Picasa and Web browser Chrome for download there starting Wednesday.

"Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information. And we believe that more available products means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for individuals in Iran and across the globe," Neil Martin, export compliance programs manager for Google, said in a blog post.

The Obama administration began permitting technology companies to export online services such as instant messaging and photo sharing to Iran in March. 

At the time, a senior Google executive applauded the decision to relax restrictions. Technology companies had not offered those services because of strict export restrictions.

Bob Boorstin, Google's director of policy communications, told human-rights activists: "We are hopeful this will help people like yourselves in this room and activists all over the world take a small step down what is certainly a long road ahead."

A Google spokeswoman said, "We worked to get these products available to the people of Iran in compliance with U.S. export controls as quickly as possible."

The push to make online services available for download in Iran got underway after protests over the disputed presidential election in 2009 there drew attention to the reach and power of digital services such as Facebook and Twitter. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said Internet freedom is a fundamental part of American foreign policy, with videos and blog posts fueling dissent in politically repressive countries.

Iran blocks access to social networking and other sites for most Iranians. Since the election, the government has condemned Facebook and Twitter, saying Iran's enemies use them in an effort to topple the regime.

Products still unavailable in Iran include AdSense, AdWords and Checkout.

Google still restricts downloads in Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, the Google spokeswoman said.

"This policy may change in the future as a result of the new Commerce Department regulation on publicly available software. For now, however, Google downloads are not available in those countries," she said.

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Lady Gaga descended on the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas for the second year in a row as the creative director of Polaroid. But this year, Gaga showed off products she helped design that are headed for retail this year.

The Gaga lineup is branded Polaroid Grey Label by Haus of Gaga and is made up of a mobile printer, dubbed the Polaprinter GL10, an aluminum rimmed instant-camera and a pair of sunglasses with a camera and two OLED screens behind the lenses.

The reveal of the three items came with applause and a few yelps from a crowd of a couple of thousand standing around Polaroid's booth -- a bit of a rarity at CES, where most media members don't clap much. Then again, Gaga is a rock star and not an average consumer electronics executive.

The sunglasses, called the Polarez GL20, and the camera, known as the Polaroid GL30, are prototypes, Gaga said, but both will arrive in stores around holiday season 2011. No prices have been set for the glasses or the camera.

The Polaprinter GL10, however, is a retail-ready product and will hit stores in May for $149.99, said Katie Linendoll, a Polaroid spokeswoman.

 Gaga said the glasses were inspired by a pair of specs she made from iPod screens for a concert. The two 1.7-inch OLED screens in the glasses sit below a user's eyes and facing outward, so the image can be seen through the glasses but not by the wearer.

The earpieces on the glasses house a USB drive where images taken by a small camera sitting on the glasses' nosepiece are saved.

The GL30 camera has a screen on it so pictures can be viewed before being printed, a feature not found on the Polaroids of the past, as well as the ability to connect to any other picture-taking device via Bluetooth to print photos from other gadgets.

The ability to share photos from a smart phone or tablet, via Bluetooth, is a feature that's also making its way to the mobile printer.

Sharing a photo with the GL10 printer, and printing it using ink-free technology, takes about 40 seconds. The printer will also be able to connect to other cameras and computers by way of USB.

When the GL10 ships, an Android app will be available that can sync phones to the printer and add borders and filter images before printing.

Polaroid printer apps for the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone handsets will arrive later this year, Linendoll said.

The GL30 camera, too, will use mobile apps to modify photos it snaps, but those apps may or may not be the same as the apps for the printer, she said, adding that the same popular smart phone platforms will be supported.

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Top photo: Lady Gaga sends a photo from her BlackBerry smart phone to the Polaroid Polaprinter GL10 she helped design, held by Polaroid Chairman Bobby Sager, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Credit: Nathan Olivarez-Giles / Los Angeles Times.

Middle image: Polaroid Grey Label printer, left, sunglasses and camera from Haus of Gaga. Credit: Polaroid

Bottom photo: Lady Gaga draws a larger crowd at the Polaroid booth. Credit: David Becker/Getty Images

Sony announced at CES that it is putting 3-D on just about every visually related product it makes, with a full line of 3-D point-and-shoot cameras, 3-D camcorders, 3-D laptops and someday 3-D screens that sit inches away from your eyes.

The electronics giant touted its product line for 2011, "a year in which 3-D becomes personal," with presentations by Sony executives, led by Chief Executive Howard Stringer at a news conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center as a part of the Consumer Electronics Show.

And Sony isn't just hoping you'll buy its 3-D movies and watch its 3-D TV channel -- called 3Net and launching in three months with assistance from the Discovery Channel and Imax -- it's hoping you'll make some 3-D content of your own, with its products of course.

Glasses will be required to see the 3-D images on Sony's Vaio F Series laptop, as well as the video and photos captured by its Cyber-Shot cameras. 

However, on the back of its Flip cam rival, the Bloggie 3-D, is a glasses-free 3-D screen 2.4 inches big, which plays back the depth-added videos and photos a user shoots. And one model of Sony's 3-D camcorders, the HDR-TD10, has a glasses-free 3.5-inch display.

The HDR-TD10 records in full high definition, with a 1080p resolution, and 3-D videos a consumer makes can be viewed on a 3-D TV via an HDMI cable. The camcorder will ship in April for about $1,500, Sony said. It will feature two lenses, two processors and two image sensors to record the 3-D images, and the camera packs a 64-gigabyte hard drive.

The 3-D Bloggie, which also records in full 1080p HD, will sell for about $250 and feature an 8-gigabyte flash drive and a 5-megapixel resolution and arrive in stores in April as well.

A Vaio laptop with a 3-D-compatible screen, dubbed the F Series, will arrive in stores later this year for about $1,700. The F Series will feature a full 1080p HD screen of 16 inches, with a TV-style 16:9 aspect ratio. Other features include a built-in Blu-ray drive and an Intel Core i7 processor. Pre-orders are being taken for the 3-D laptops at www.sonystyle.com/fseries.

Sony displayed a glasses-free 3-D screen on a portable Blu-ray player, but that was just a prototype, as was a 3-D head-mounted display that looked somewhat like the eyepiece worn by the comic book character Cyclops from X-Men.

The head-mounted prototype is made up of two OLED displays that send a unique image to each eye to create the 3-D effect.

Sony also showed off -- at its CES booth and not onstage -- three prototype glasses-free TVs for home use: a 24.5-inch OLED screen and a 46-inch and a 56-inch LCD set.

Kazuo "Kaz" Hirai, head of Sony Computer Entertainment, made some non-3-D teases, saying PlayStation-related products in the mobile space would be arriving later in the year, and he said Sony was working on a tablet.

But Hirai and Sony offered no details on the tablet, what it would look like or when it would arrive, just that it was being worked on.

Sony also announced a monthly subscription music streaming service called Music Unlimited, which will be offered this year through its Qriocity streaming media platform on its Internet-connected TVs and PlayStation 3. Just how much the service will cost, or an official release date, wasn't disclosed.

Aside from 3-D, Stringer said Internet-connected TVs were Sony's other main consumer push, estimating that more than 50 million TVs will be Internet-enabled worldwide through Sony's PlayStation 3, Wi-Fi Blu-ray players and Internet-connected TVs.

"This is a significant base of connected products," he said. "Size does matter."

Before getting into the flurry of 3-D-related announcements, the presentation was started with a scene in 3-D from the Sony Pictures movie "The Green Hornet," which hits theaters Jan. 14.

After the preview, which the crowd watched with 3-D glasses, a rotating platform on the stage showcased the Black Beauty car from the movie, with Stringer and "Green Hornet" stars Seth Rogen and Jay Chou.

Standing alongside the two Hollywood celebrities, Stringer said with little laughs, "You've got to think that this car makes James Bond's Aston Martin look sissy, doesn't it?"

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Photos: Top, the Sony HDR-TD10 and, bottom, the Bloggie 3-D. Credit: Sony

The Twitter photo poster Twitpic took about a year to reach 1 million users. Photosharing app Instagram has done it in three months.

Users started signing up in droves within a few minutes of the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch app’s debut at the iTunes App Store on Oct. 6, the Instagram team said in a blog post. The app involves a slew of languages -– including Russian, Chinese and Italian –- and a range of filters with names like “Toaster” and “Earlybird” that users can apply to photos.

Gathering such a large network had initially seemed like “a big hairy audacious goal” for the free app, the team wrote.

The social photo app space is crowded, with offerings from other developers such as Flickr, PicPlz and Path.

In other numbers news, Bloomberg is quoting anonymous sources who claim that Amazon will probably sell more than 8 million Kindle e-readers this year, compared with about 2.4 million last year.

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Dreaming of a white Christmas? Will a desaturated one –- with an ashen Santa thrown in –- do?

Throngs of red-suited St. Nick copycats crowded San Francisco at the annual SantaCon on Saturday. Among them, in many photos of the event: a black-and-white pigtailed Santa, a vision in gray, looking as if all her color had been drained away.

She looks like she had been digitally inserted in the photos. She had not.

She would be Brody S. of Berkeley, who has asked that her name and profession not be disclosed.

“I’m not sure if it’s a GET OFF MY LAWN response to digital manipulation vs authentic experience, or if I’m Monday morning quarterbacking-style overthinking this,” she wrote in a blog post. “All I know is, it sure was fun, and that’s what I was going for.”

Brody, an atheist who doesn’t celebrate the holiday, first appeared as “Desaturated Santa” at the Bay Area event last year as “something of a lark.” This was after she tired of two years of dressing up as “SluttyClaus like a lot of women.”

“SantaCon has nothing to do with Christmas for me. It's just funny to be in a group of 1,000 people dressed up as Santa,” she wrote in an e-mail. “It would be just as funny if we were dressed like rabbits or potted ferns.”

So Brody bought a sewing pattern and made herself a Santa suit in a dark gray fabric. She took the cloth to a Kryolan SF, a cosmetics and beauty supply store, and color-matched some makeup for her skin.

Then came the gray wig and contacts. A photographer friend taught her how to paint her face. The entire get-up took months to assemble.

Once in public, the waterproof eyeliner on Brody’s lips kept coming off. She feared that eating would cause smudges, so she subsisted on juices and boba tea.

But the hassle was worth it, as she took photos with fans, many of whom said she looked like a zombie or robot version of Santa. The Santa parade comes to Los Angeles this weekend.

“It’s easier, faster and cheaper to use a green screen, to use Photoshop to desaturate or to add crazy color,” she wrote on her blog. “But I’d rather travel, sew and paint, or get naked and bodypainted any time.”

Wonder if she ever goes to Comic-Con.

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Photos: Ben Thompson, from Brody S.'s BrodyQat Flickr account.