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Industry Trends

Nokia To Launch Visual Search

By December 9, 2008July 30th, 2023No Comments

At a recent briefing held at their research center in Palo Alto, Nokia has announced that they would shortly be launching a visual search service called”Point & Find”.

Search, which has already become an extremely important feature of mobile technology, is now set to combine itself with the mobile camera and GPS.

The working of this new service is quite simple really. All one needs to do, is to “point” his mobile camera at an object, and as soon as the mobile has “seen” the object, it will “find” all the internet links, connected to the object in question and display them on the mobile screen. The user then selects whichever link is most appropriate and clicks on it.

Nokia and its content and advertising partners are in the process of tagging all the images to form a database for this new service of theirs. The service will be offered sector by sector, as the database gets consolidated.

To start with, they will offer this service for the movie sector only. If a user points at a particular movie poster, the service will find and provide various links such as, where the film is running, show timings, reviews, trailer, ticket bookings etc. The links shown will also depend on the current location of the mobile GPS.

This service will thus create interactivity, and according to Philipp Schloter, Nokia’s General Manager for Point & Find, it could turn into a money spinner, for brands and advertisers, who could thus connect with their target audience and encourage impulse buying.

Initially this service will be beta tested in the U.S. and U.K.

If things go as planned, Nokia would be the first company to launch this innovative service.

It will be a free service for users, and will be accessible initially, only to users of the N95. Later however, it may be extended to include all GPS enabled camera phones, irrespective of the brand.