But these applications are all proprietary. A real market for this requires some standardization, and for marketers, operators, and handset vendors to be 'on the same page'. |
I think the scanning functions open up some interesting possibilities to content suppliers as well as hardware manufacturers and therefore will be promoted. |
Imagine walking through the park and aiming your camera phone at a data tag on a statue. It directs your phone's browser to a Web page about a historic building that used to stand there, or a concert that played there last summer, complete with video clips. |
It means using the camera phone not as a picture-taker, but as a scanner capturing metadata about products or services related to objects around us. I think we'll see more of this in coming years. |
Mobile media promises to be a major topic of discussion, as operators are looking for the next big thing to entice customers to use 3G networks. |
There are some rudimentary scanning functions now available in cell phones and those features should improve over time. |