Over at the CeBIT show in Germany, Vodafone has been showing off Otello, a visual search engine. It’s still in the early stages, but it works like other similar systems, allowing users to send a photo in by MMS, and Otello’s servers will do their image-recognition magic, and send back search results or other info.
On its own, Otello doesn’t sound especially groundbreaking, but it’s just the latest in the ever-growing trend of services that look to both link the physical and virtual worlds, and to simplify search. It’s quite similar to the Nokia Point & Find service I wrote about in December, and has some parallels to what Intel demoed during its CES keynote.
Otello is also being used by a German newspaper, whose readers can photo “specially marked articles” and send them in, then access related multimedia content on their mobile — which sounds like a job for QR codes, another technology in this space that’s slowly gaining a foothold outside Japan.
I talked to their business developer who regards Otello as alternative to QR codes.
Advantage, IMHO: no need for consumer to download app beforehand or for Vodaphone to develop ecosystem; disadvantage: cost of sending MMS picture (typically 0.39EUR)