Some of you may have started noticing a mobile content search engine appearing on the top of MOpocket’s text section the last couple of days. That, ladies and gentleman, is Mogmo, MOpockets sponsor for the month of September.
A product of Tamej Software (a software company focused on mobile content and decisions for mobile sales.), Mogmo is a search engine specifically designed to help you fine the mobile content that you are looking for. Everything from games, ringtones, images and even themes for you mobile device are only a search click away.
I would not just put any old mobile content search engine at the top of MOpocket… so give it a try and you will see what I mean.
MocoNews reports that search giant Google has acquired Santa Monica-based mobile photo-recognition software firm Neven Vision. Old MOPocket readers will remember that Neven Visions technology was the first blogpost ever here on MOpocket in which I said…
But perhaps the coolest feature that Neven Vision is developing along these lines is an object recognition and visual search technology called i-SCOUT that Neven himself describes as “a visual google.†The image recognition algorithms can recognize anything from an ipod to a picture of the Mona Lisa to the flower in the above picture. Link this to a database of images and you have yourself a pretty nifty search platform for anyone sporting a camera phone.
So, now we have to wonder… what is Google up to… a visual search applications via mobile? According to MocoNews Neven’s technology will be used to better enable search within photos and will be incorporated into Google’s Picasa software.
“Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about.â€
So, thats not bad for a start but their are so many other great things Google can do with this.
So much out there today and so little time. So here are a bunch of links about these things that I find worthy of mobile news where nothing more need be said. I think i’ll make this “links in your pocket” section a somewhat regular thing… just because I like the name. SO scroll down and see if any of these links meet your fancy.
Via the Sunday Times. The first ever Mobile Search & Discovery conference convened this month at the Cafe Royal hotel in London. Topic of conversation: to bring together mobile-phone and technology companies eager to repeat Google’s success. All one has to consider is the enormous success Google has had connecting internet users with their pay per click Adsense and Adwords advertising program.
Mobile industry leaders see a big advantage for the mobile medium in the advertising market. Why? Apparently companies like Google, MSN and Yahoo only reach 1 billion PC’s, a number that is doubled when you consider how many more mobile phone users there are in the world.
Mobile-phone companies, therefore, see an opportunity to create a hugely profitable new medium for advertising and e-commerce. The mobile firms have some advantages over Google and Yahoo in choosing which ads to serve up. They know where their customers are; what they spend; and have a billing relationship with them.
Let’s throw the product out there and see what works for users. It’s a little bit early to look for links on a mobile phone. We want to be sure what the user wants first. We want to be sure we have a great product, and then find a way to monetise.â€
This a big deal to mobile marketers. Unlike internet advertising, the mobile networks and handset manufacturers can be obstacles to mobile advertising.
Google was after a bigger slice of an advertising pie worth billions — a pie that fixed- line telecoms companies had already surrendered. “They have no incentive to operate with the carriers. I don’t see Google sharing revenues with BT or Deutsche Telekom,†says Dan Olschwang CEO of Jumptap.
The objection to this is the relative success of Google and the mobile industry in generating demand for new products and services over the past five years. While Google has scored a runaway success, mobile firms have struggled to make meaningful revenue from picture- messaging, location-based services and song downloads.
I would not be surprised to see a “Google Ringtones” service coming soon. Or perhaps a Google MVNO?
Relevant article:Admob claims to be the world’s first pay-per-click mobile advertising marketplace. A mobile version of Google’s AdSense? [via Textually]
Via the Sunday Times. The first ever Mobile Search & Discovery conference convened this month at the Cafe Royal hotel in London. Topic of conversation: to bring together mobile-phone and technology companies eager to repeat Google’s success. All one has to consider is the enormous success Google has had connecting internet users with their pay per click Adsense and Adwords advertising program.
Mobile industry leaders see a big advantage for the mobile medium in the advertising market. Why? Apparently companies like Google, MSN and Yahoo only reach 1 billion PC’s, a number that is doubled when you consider how many more mobile phone users there are in the world.
Mobile-phone companies, therefore, see an opportunity to create a hugely profitable new medium for advertising and e-commerce. The mobile firms have some advantages over Google and Yahoo in choosing which ads to serve up. They know where their customers are; what they spend; and have a billing relationship with them.
Let’s throw the product out there and see what works for users. It’s a little bit early to look for links on a mobile phone. We want to be sure what the user wants first. We want to be sure we have a great product, and then find a way to monetise.â€
This a big deal to mobile marketers. Unlike internet advertising, the mobile networks and handset manufacturers can be obstacles to mobile advertising.
Google was after a bigger slice of an advertising pie worth billions — a pie that fixed- line telecoms companies had already surrendered. “They have no incentive to operate with the carriers. I don’t see Google sharing revenues with BT or Deutsche Telekom,†says Dan Olschwang CEO of Jumptap.
The objection to this is the relative success of Google and the mobile industry in generating demand for new products and services over the past five years. While Google has scored a runaway success, mobile firms have struggled to make meaningful revenue from picture- messaging, location-based services and song downloads.
I would not be surprised to see a “Google Ringtones” service coming soon. Or perhaps a Google MVNO?
Relevant article:Admob claims to be the world’s first pay-per-click mobile advertising marketplace. A mobile version of Google’s AdSense? [via Textually]
Concerned parents and suspicious wives have another alternative. World-Tracker.com , a UK based company, allows anyone to track a GSM cell phone as it wonders around the globe.
The technology apparently uses cell tower data (or GPS, when available) to track the location of just about any GSM cellphone (via a Google Maps interface).
The service costs 16 pence per request with no other hardware or software required (for either your computer or the phone in which you are tracking).
The service promises to track a mobile phone accurately between 50m to 500m, however the company says this may vary from network provider to network provider.
While cheating husbands should be concerned, the site also claims some great commercial usages for the service such as “locating your company mobiles at any time,” “utilizing your fleet more effectively,” “providing additional safety to lone workers,” and or “recovering your lost or misplaced mobile phone.”
But you just cant track any phone at whim. The first time you try to track a phone, a text message is sent to the owner, who must reply in order to enable tracking.
For now, the system only works in the UK and is only compatible with any handset working on the four main UK Network providers – O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile.
As the service has yet to hit the United States there is no word yet on the Civil Liberty issues that such a technology will most definitely bring to the table.
As their move to dominate the mobile world continues, the Mountain View California based company started offering their personalized Google home-page for mobile devices this weekend. The website, which is in xhtml format, is tailored to work on most mobile phones and various screen sizes. The Google mobile services are specially designed to function well on smaller screens and the slower connection speeds associated with most mobile network data plans.
The mobile personalized home page allows consumers to conduct web searches (for both the web as well as the mobile web), check Gmail email, news headlines, local weather reports and or a list of stock prices.
The service is planned to be made available to users in international markets in a couple months but it appears that international users can access the service by visiting http://www.google.com/ig/mobile on their mobile phones.
This is a big moment in the history of the mobile medium as Google has made it much easier for the everyday user to get personalized information on their phone.
Visit http://www.google.com/xhtml on your mobile phone to try it out. But you must already have a Google account.
“What kind of flower is that?†I don’t know either. I have been inside playing with gadgets for too long to even remember what grass looks like. (I’m just kidding of course… the reason I can’t remember what grass looks like is because I live in NYC). Anyway, my guess is that it is some sort of daisy. Well, soon you will be able to use your camera phone to find things like this out. Neven Vision the Santa Monica, California Company founded by University of California computer scientist Hartmut Neven is taking the business of Image Recognition Software to a whole new low-cost microprocessing level. In other words, Image Recognition Software will soon be available for your camera phone and other consumer electronics. Cellphone companies like Vodafone Japan and NTT DoCoMo are already offering services that use Neven Vision Technology like “MovieMask†which reads your facial expression and then adds the appropriate special effect (like a tear if your sad for those of us who can never cry). Neven Vision is already talking with European dealers about using the same technology. Neven Vision is also applying their “Minority Report like†Biometrics technology to create a security application that reads your facial patterns, skin texture and iris pattern to secure your identity when making purchases via your cell phone (a day that has yet to come to pass in the US). Their Mobile Identifier software is already being picked up by law enforcement agencies in order to make it easier to identify subjects (by means of facial recognition and even fingerprints) in the field and is being considered for other types of security measures as well.
Of course, we can imagine how such a technology could be used in the reverse as a kind of pocket sized Orwellian nightmare. But perhaps the coolest feature that Neven Vision is developing along these lines is an object recognition and visual search technology called i-SCOUT that Neven himself describes as “a visual google.†The image recognition algorithms can recognize anything from an ipod to a picture of the Mona Lisa to the flower in the above picture. Link this to a database of images and you have yourself a pretty nifty search platform for anyone sporting a camera phone. Simply take a picture of an object. Send it to the database. And within ten seconds receive all the relevant information you need. “Eventually every building and object will be in the database,†Neven says. In 10 years “we’ll look back and wonder how we could have surrounded ourselves with so many blind machines.†The visual world literally becomes hyper-linked at our extremely mobile fingertips. So, the next time (within 10 years) you backpack through a foreign country, take a picture of that statue to find out how old it really is. Or snap a picture of that German road sign and translate it into English in order to finally understand what the Germans really mean by “Fahrt.â€
Some of you may have started noticing a mobile content search engine appearing on the top of MOpocket’s text section the last couple of days. That, ladies and gentleman, is Mogmo, MOpockets sponsor for the month of September.
