Camera phones to get search tech

By early next year, cartons of milk sold by a European dairy manufacturer will have images of CD art printed on them. Accompanying each image will be a message urging people to take a picture of the art with a mobile phone camera. Then, if the phone photographer sends the snapshot to a database operated by a marketing outfit, a free song will be sent to the phone from the band's sponsoring record label.

In the US, people will also be able to use their mobile phones to take a picture of a movie billboard, and then send the image to a similar database that returns a film trailer, locates a cinema showing the movie advertised on the billboard or allows the user to buy tickets to the movie.

It's all part of what several upstart companies have dubbed 'mobile visual search' -- technology promoted as an easier, more efficient way to get information on the go, without having to type on a tiny keypad.

It's possible thanks to sophisticated object and facial recognition software that can match images with those scanned into an Internet-connected database. A match can trigger a range of possible results, including promotions, ring tones, pricing, maps and search results.

"One of the biggest problems of the wireless Web -- it's not that people don't want it, it's that the Web is based on a keyboard and a mouse. We keep trying to simulate that with 12 keys on the phone," said Lauren Bigelow, chief marketing officer at Mobot, a mobile visual search company.

Facial and object recognition technology has been around for years, and has become a cornerstone of security applications used in airports and by the military. But now, companies see the opportunity to adapt the technology to improve the mobile marketing and search business.

Eventually, experts say, object recognition could be used to connect travellers with information on local restaurants, shops, museums or parks.

"If there's an economic reason to do it, it will happen," said Aaron Bobick, chairman of the interactive and intelligence computing division in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech university.

Of course, there are hurdles. Researchers say it will be another three years before 90 per cent of mobile phones sold in the US will include a camera feature. Mobile phone carriers need to adopt the technology. And consumers, of course, would have to learn how to use it.

Money phones
Neven Vision, a Santa Monica-based company, has developed software that can be embedded in handsets or in a download from a Web site.

Neven's marketing application, called iScout, turns traditional forms of advertising such as magazines, billboards, newspapers, or any white space on a product, into a Web-marketing tool. It has signed a deal with a dairy manufacturer in Europe, which execs won't yet name, to place iScout's 'hyperlinks' on milk bottles for a year.

"All these surfaces in the physical world can now be hyperlinked, and they all turn into added information. A milk bottle gets a whole different value," said Hartmut Neven, chief technology officer of Neven Vision.