Vodafone Launches Otello, An Image Search For Mobile Phones

Images are search engine's new keywords.

Last week Physical World Connection player SnapTell launched their image recognition application for the mobile.

Vodafone Shows Image Search for Mobile Phones (NY Times)

At the Cebit trade show in Germany, Vodafone is demonstrating Otello, a search engine that uses images as input.

Instead of entering a word or phrase users send pictures via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) from their mobile phones.

The picture can be anything from a historical building to a CD cover, according to Vodafone. Otello then returns information relevant to the picture to the mobile phone, just like a normal search engine.

Vodafone's reasoning behind image search is that it's more convenient to take a picture than to enter search terms with a phone that lacks a normal keyboard.

Starting Monday Vodafone is conducting a trial with German paper Bild. Readers can find out more about specially-marked articles by photographing them with their mobile phone camera and sending the image to Bild.

Anyone know who could open their enormous database of images for this service?

Think of the possibilities if any image could direct a mobile user to a specific URL.

Nokia's Point & Find the Perfect Physical World Connection Solution?

Could Nokia be developing the ideal solution for mobile barcode recognition?
Will this finally solve the question Pick A 2d Code, Any Code

MoVa Media, a mobile barcode recognition company, suggests that Nokia's acquisition of Pixto could offer the ideal solution for Physical World Connection.

Nokia's Point & Find lets people point a camera phone at an object or picture and find out more about it or buy it just by clicking once when its name comes up on the screen.

It works by linking a set of image properties with a URL for information about what's in the image. When a user points the phone's camera at something, the system compares what the viewfinder sees with sets of image properties in a database. Also taking into consideration the user's location, it then delivers useful information about what the user is looking at.

For example, pointing the phone at a movie poster and pressing a key could make a page pop up that offers an ad for the movie and a way to buy a ticket at the theater nearest the user.

Pointing the phone at the street might bring up a contact page for a local cab company. The system could give retailers, transit agencies, manufacturers, and others the chance to reach consumers while making it easier and more intuitive for consumers to find things, Nokia said

MoVa Media says this:
Here’s what I think. This technology would definitely be more useful and intuitive than barcode recognition, simply because it wouldn’t rely solely on barcodes for data recognition. Also, consumers could immediately start using this, instead of waiting for retailers, and manufacturers to develop mainstream barcoding techniques.