Friday, July 13, 2007

What Could Google Be Doing With Mobile Bar Codes?


What could Google be doing with camera phones and bar codes?

Bill Slawsky makes a great discovery about a new mobile bar code patent awarded to Dr Harmut Neven. This is the same Harmut Neven that ran NevenVision, a mobile imaging recognition company, that was acquired by Google last August.NevenVision

NevenVision has an extensive intellectual property property covering camera phones and physical world connection.

A couple things I find of interest. They received this patent pretty quickly and that this mobile barcode patent was filed after Google acquired the mobile imaging recognition player.

The patent summary:

"Content media having images associated with remotely stored information are provided with barcodes marked with indicia to indicate a source of the information. In this manner, a user, having, for example, a camera phone, will become aware that the particular content medium has images that can be scanned to retrieve additional information (from the remote information store) via their camera phone."

NTT DoCoMo announced they would be embedding NevenVision's image recognition technology on their phones. The NTT DoCoMo application is based on Neven Vision's patented facial recognition technology, which is uniquely designed to work within mobile devices without having to communicate with a central server system.

Google is very aware of the impact mobile bar codes and Physical World Connection will have on mobile search, mobile advertising and mobile commerce.


Want to know who I think is next to get gobbled up?

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