In a move that could bring bleeding edge digital camera technology into future Nokia smartphone models, the venture arm of the Finnish company is investing in Pelican Imaging, a Mountain View, Calif., startup.
The investment by Nokia Growth Partners in Pelican, which makes digital camera technology that uses multiple lenses to create images, is part of a bid by the mobile phone maker to stand out in the smartphone market, where its fortunes have been less than stellar.
The size of the investment by NGP hasn’t been disclosed by the venture firm yet.
Nokia has made a number of moves involving imaging technology in recent months. It bought Scalado, a Swedish imaging company, last July; NGP also has invested in InVisage Technologies, a California image-sensing technology company, and Heptagon, a Singapore optics maker.
Pelican’s technology uses an array of lenses rather than a single lens to capture photos. The information from the multiple viewpoints provided by the lenses gets crunched by Pelican’s software to create a single, high-quality image.
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