All Things D had a story on a new startup, Glmps (pronounced "glimpse"), which has created a new iPhone app that captures the moments just before taking a still image on your iPhone. It achieves this by recording video from the moment the camera is engaged. Once everything is captured you can save it to their website and share via Twitter or Facebook. They even have Foursquare check-in.
Now, the social aspects of this are sort of hygiene at this point and the concept, while appearing innovative, has been done already and patented. Ina Fried actually mentions this in the article referencing Sony who had a simliar feature integrated into their Cybershot cameras. Here's where Glmps may be on the verge of some IP difficulties.
The patent for the technology that Sony used is actually held by Sony Ericsson who debuted it in the K800i cameraphone in 2006 under the name "Best Pic"(video below the break). The technology was to record/buffer a series of frames before and after shutter activation by - you guessed it - beginning to buffer still frames once the camera was activated (video below). The user could then select the best picture from any one of the recorded frames. Sony Ericsson then licensed this over to the Cybershot team at Sony.
