I remember writing about an iPhone app few months back used to record few seconds of a song you hear (in a restaurant or radio) so that the song can be identified and if needed purchased from Apple's iTunes store. I was appreciating the tight integration of all the features available in iPhone to make this work (microphone to record the clip, wireless network to send it to the search server, iTunes store that can sell the song to the user, built-in MP3 player to play the song later, etc.).
Now Google is supporting a new application for smart phones that is sort of long overdue. With this app called Google Goggles in place, you can take a picture of any item (say a tourist spot, a book cover, wine bottle label, etc.) and send it to Google which will provide more information about it. Basically you can search using real pictures instead of words. Pretty cool. You can see a quick slide show about it at
If the link does not work, You can Google this term "Google Goggles Breathes New Life into Android Phone Pics". Good integration of Google search service and the camera feature available in cell phone now. For now this is available only on smart phones that run the Google Android Operating System.
Technical challenges involved in these projects are mind boggling. Often I see smaller scale pilot projects of many such applications that go on ahead of time in other countries.
Case in point: When I was in France way back in 1994, saw this application terminal called "MiniTel" connected to individual home/business telephone line. It is like a small mainframe monochrome computer terminal/keyboard that can be used to look up telephone number and address of people/businesses allover France. Looked like a simple text based precursor to white/yellowpages.com on the internet now.
Similarly, a precursor for Google Goggles seems to be an application deployed for the past few years in Japan where you can scan/take a picture of any bar code and use it to fetch additional information. For example if you scan the bar code posted on a railway platform, your smartphone will fetch the train timetable from the web/network. Though this is very narrow (i.e only bar code reading instead of user typing in the number), sounded like the perfect pilot project to what Google is doing now.
But as it often happens, even if the seed comes from outside, when the US behemoths get involved, the reach/scope just explodes.
No comments:
Post a Comment