I just spent some time with Ontela Chief Executive Dan Shapiro, whose Seattle mobile software startup will unveil itself at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas next week.

Shapiro, a 30-year-old former manager at RealNetworks, Wildseed and Microsoft, demonstrated a patent-pending technology that he says will allow third party developers to create all sorts of compelling applications for camera phones.

At first, I thought Ontela would compete directly with Vizrea and PixPulse -- Seattle startups that allow camera phone users to share and organize digital photos.

While there certainly is some overlap with those two companies, (Ontela's software does allow individuals to route photos from camera phones to PCs and photo sharing Web sites) Shapiro said the technology goes deeper. For example, a camera phone user who was browsing history books at Barnes & Noble could take a photo of the bar code on a biography of Harry Truman and then get a text message a minute later with a link to the book on Amazon.com. Similarly, a person could take a photo of a business card and have it automatically integrated into their personal contacts list or take a photo of a white board and have a PDF of the diagram sent to a folder on their personal computer.

"It is all about the applications that can be built on top of this technology," said Shapiro. "So now, you can be able to select from any of our partners ... and enable you to do things with the camera phone pictures. So as you take these pictures, they are automatically routed to the correct partner -- whether it be a snapshot I want to share, a bar code that I want to do comparative price search or a movie poster that I want to go look up the show times. I can select from which of those I want enabled ... and those pictures will automatically be routed to the right application."

Eventually Shapiro said the company will build its own consumer applications -- including a service that moves camera phone pictures to image editing applications like Picassa or photo sharing Web sites such as Flickr.

Ontela's technology will debut this summer. Next week at CTIA, it plans to announce its first development partner and the name of the service. Ontela is backed with an undisclosed amount of angel financing. It employs three people, including former Microsoft and Expedia developer Charles Zapata and former Microsoft manager Brian Schultz (who previously co-founded Djinnisys Corp.) The 2-year-old company also is working with a software development operation in India.

Here is the story I did on Vizrea earlier this year, which also includes comments from Shapiro and PixPulse founder David Xue.