Vodafone's Picture Physical World Connection

If you've been reading my blog you know that I've been working on code scanning and I believe in that technology as one novel solution to genuine handset usability problem. (BTW, Digit Wireless is recently is making a comeback from a couple quiet years with a new CEO)

People on the go are getting the value of retrieving information or content through their phones by scanning codes (esp. in UK), taking pictures of products etc.

That said, I see codes as a cumbersome geeky solution. too difficult, too many formats fragmenting the market, technologies etc. client development, QA and distribution challenges...

Either way, I won't argue the point of taking a picture of the product vs. a code next to it here (people will rightfully argue the probability of getting to the content one wants is not acceptable other than through code scanning), but I do want to say this:

Take a phone, take a picture of the product you're interested in, send it to a good correlation algorithm, use Google's infinite DB of images, send the user an interesting URL back.

That's an interesting proposition. And Vodafone's just launched it. Perhaps not the best performance, but good on them to get going.

This fits right into the Google's marketing expertise. They should be interested in this