There’s nothing more exciting than a first-hand look at path-breaking innovation from a company to be reckoned with in mobile search – and this is exactly what I came away with when I left an invitation-only briefing at Nokia’s research center in Palo Alto, California. The main attraction: An image-based mobile search application called Point & Find.

Granted, Nokia has been talking up its visual mobile search capabilities since 2007, when it snapped up Pixto, a San Francisco-based startup specialized in the technology. But now we’re seeing real results and Nokia execs say a launch is imminent. (More specifically, the app will enter public beta testing “very soon” in the U.S. and the U.K.)

But the real news is Nokia’s bid to be the leader in visual search and the implications for the other players up and down the value chain.

It’s good news for the user. Reams have been written about features and functionality (visual and voice-enabled schemes as well as the tighter integration of location and maps) in the mobile search experience, improvements that are sorely needed to deliver a better quality mobile search experience. (Take my word for it. Together with Peggy Anne Salz, I am road testing mobile search services and documenting their many shortcomings.)

Nokia’s Point & Find’s is more than a mobile search tool, however; it represents the core of Nokia’s larger business strategy that brings together software, services and advertising. Put another way, Point & Find is a perfect articulation of a new vision within Nokia and a new emphasis on ways to bridge the physical and virtual worlds.

Search is already the de facto interface to all things digital in online and mobile settings. Add to that location and harness the camera capabilities of the device we have with us at all times and you have a powerful combination.

The true potential of this scheme can be seen in the rise in visual search and the advance in bar code/QR code campaigns. In fact, Peggy Anne has conducted briefings with a number of visual search companies and the companies, including Mobile Data Systems (MDS), which provide barcode technology and symbologies to get the inside track on progress to date and issues to tackle. Her take includes a look at the competitive landscape and constructive criticism directed at an industry white paper that tips the scales in favor of proprietary solutions, so please check back.

But MSG isn’t the only one excited about this new territory. As Philipp Schloter, Nokia’s general manager of Point & Find, told me at the event: Nokia is gearing up for “exciting journey.” Now that I’ve had a glimpse into Nokia’s product map and future innovations, I can only agree. While a few concepts such as nano-scale wireless technologies are a few years away (more on that in another post), Point & Find is here NOW. Fortunately for all of us at MSG, it’s a search, discovery, and advertising application we can track from day one.

So how does Point & Find work? The user points the camera at a physical object and is presented with a selection of Internet links associated with that object. (They are displayed on the screen.) It’s then up to the user to click on whatever link they’re most interested in to access a service or content related to that object. The service is pretty much a no-brainer. It serves up Internet links to the handset (zero-click).  Speed is another plus: The content comes up on the screen immediately, as soon as the device “sees” the physical object.

And how does it work on the back-end? Nokia has created a simple tagging tool for Point & Find that the company and its content, brand and advertising partners are using to build content for the service. Once tagged, the URLs for all images and related Internet information that have been tagged for the service become part of the Point & Find database. Obviously, at the outset, this database will be specific to the particular services offered, and Nokia will be building it and commercializing it one content sector at a time. But the concept is unlimited, and Nokia clearly intents to build it out as far as it will go.

Where will we see Point & Find? Well, it’s literally coming to a theater near you.

Nokia will kick off Point & Find with a full-fledged service around movies–a category sure to be a crowd-pleaser–that also allows Nokia to exploit the full capabilities and features of its new service. Use cases and scenarios are easy enough to imagine. A user can point the camera phone at a movie poster and Point & Find returns links to related content and services such as the film trailer, reviews, the nearest cinema showing the film, ticket sales sites or nearby stores that sell related retail products.

The list goes on – and so do the applications. In fact Philipp mused that Nokia’s Point & Find could sit at the center of a wide variety of services. Whether the physical object we capture with our phones is a building, a public landmark, city street sign, restaurant, item in a store window, a book or a magazine cover-it doesn’t matter. The system can deliver information, content and advertising related to the object. Looking ahead, Nokia believes the service could also evolve to include user-generated content and content published via social networking or other sites. (Peggy Anne adds: Smart move, since this content is popular and tough for the usual pick of search engines to index. Could Nokia take the lead in creating linkages between physical content and the cool stuff WE create? Now that is an interesting business model indeed! )

But it’s not just about content; context is also critical. Philipp and his team have combined key devices capabilities and features – such as location-awareness artificial intelligence and pattern recognition technology and analysis – to intuit the real-time context of the user when they use Point & Find to capture an object. As Philipp pointed out: Knowing context allows the system to predict what the consumer needs to know about the object. “Phone search is limited,” he said.  “What if the phone could guess what you want?”

But even more fundamentally, the phone now becomes the way to access information and interact with the world around us. As Philipp explained it, it’s all about creating a world in which everything is interactive (a concept that also sits at the center of Nokia strategy).

Indeed, the ability to create interactivity out of non-interactive objects is one of Point & Find’s most vital attributes. And if Philipp is right it may also develop into a hugely lucrative business for Nokia as brands and advertisers take advantage of the service to connect with consumers at the point of discovery–the best moment to encourage an impulse buy. Not to mention the pitch Nokia’s mobile advertising arm can make to its clients.

Point & Find will be free to consumers. To start they can download it to their N95 devices (a rather limited demographic for advertising), but plans are to make it available to run on any GPS-enabled camera phone.

How will it make money? Nokia and its partners will generate revenues through advertising and other tools such as lead generation and ecommerce capabilities. Philipp is also betting on Nokia’s partners to come up with other innovative ways to generate revenues from the service. To this end he’s staffed professional services team at Point & Find to help Nokia’s partners develop and deploy monetization strategies.

To be clear: There are other image-based mobile phone discovery tools out there (here’s a good list to use as a primer). And Peggy Anne is investigating a variety of bar code companies and applications already on the market from the likes of SnapNow. But let’s get real: This is Nokia, with all the market scale and established ecosystem that the name implies.

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My take: Nokia is committed to owning the visual search space and has committed a staff of 30 to build the business and further develop the technology. The business area has the buy-in of Nokia senior execs and “quite large” funding from the company (as Philipp put it). The market is crowding as players ranging from Google to Kooaba line up for a piece of the action. But the connection between the app and the phone – which Nokia can exploit to its advantage – plays in its favor. The space will heat up in 2009 – but that’s precisely the excitement and interest we need to move this mobile search/mobile advertising scheme a giant step forward.

Tags: Kooaba, Mobile Advertising, Nokia, visual search

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Local Search, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.