The NY Times has posted an article about a new bar-code reading feature that
will be available on the next generation of cell phones, enabling us to access
an almost unlimited amount of data about any item picked up by our phones.
Here's the first part of the article (read the rest by clicking here):
It sounds like something straight out of a futuristic film: House hunters,
driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cellphone at the sign. With a
click, their cellphone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms
and baths and lots of other details about the house.Media experts say that
cellphones, the Swiss Army knives of technology, are quickly heading in this
direction. New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in
development in the United States, allows the phones to connect everyday objects
with the Internet.
In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as
one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on
everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its
screen.
“The cellphone is the natural tool to combine the physical world with the
digital world,” that executive, Cyriac Roeding, the head of mobile-phone
applications for CBS, said the other day.
In Japan, McDonald’s customers can already point their cellphones at the
wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens.
Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance
quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And
film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards.
Advertisers say they are interested in offering similar capabilities in the
United States, but cellphones in the States do not come with the necessary
software. For now, consumers have to download the technology themselves.
Still, big advertising and technology companies like Hewlett-Packard and the
Publicis Groupe, an advertising conglomerate, are pushing to popularize the
technology here.
Until now, in most parts of the world, Web surfing has been separate from
everyday activities like riding the train, watching television and driving. But
the new technology may erode that distinction.
“You’ve picked up this product, and you don’t want to go back to your
PC,” said Tim Kindberg, a senior research at the Bristol, England, lab of
Hewlett-Packard. “Or you’re outside this building, and you want more
information. We call it the ‘physical hyperlink.’ ”
In much the same way that Web publishing took off because of the ability to link
to other people’s sites, cellphone technologies linking everyday objects with
the Web would reveal the digitally encoded attributes of tangible things on
grocery shelves or newsstands.
“Everything in the physical world has information related to it somewhere
electronically, including yourself and the desk you’re sitting in,” said
Chas Fritz, chief executive of NeoMedia Technologies, a company developing these
cellphone capacities.
|