Thursday, March 4, 2010

Mobile Phone Cams: The Next Mouse ?




It seems like the momentum for visual search driven experiences is growing and growing. Personally, i think we are just in the beginning of the wave, since 4G is about to enter the picture, the average megapixels of Mobile cams is shooting up month over month, and autofocus features are becoming the standard in cams. As all of these inevitable advancements in the mobile space come online i think we will see a huge shift in mobile search.

I mentioned this in an earlier post about a phenomenon i am calling the Visual Search Wars . Google is on board with Google Goggles. A slew of start ups have a number of barcode scanning offerings. For instance the GoodGuide is a simple yet well executed barcode scanning app.

In my opinion in 18 months from now the shift towards mobile visual search will really kick into overdrive. Besides the increase in average capabilities of mobile devices and networks, we will have fundamental improvements in image recognition tech and its wide availability to developers like TMD. A number of companies are pushing image recognition and text recognition forward as well. For instance Kooaba announced their image recognition API this morning. Evernote has had an API for a long time. Microsoft is now in the game with their TAG app on both the iPhone and Android.

This is an exciting space that i think much of mobile innovation will revolve around in the next 2 years. Stay Tuned for TMD's own mobile app that is a foray into the "visual search" space.

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