Telecom service provider rejoice as creativity enters MMS . Vodaphone’s “Otello” , mobile phone search engine uses Images instead of text. Steps involved :
1. Take a picture
2. Send as MMS
3. Search result returned as text.

This search technology will change the way people look at searches. Vodaphone clarifies over using images :

it’s more convenient to take a picture than to enter search terms with a phone that lacks a normal keyboard.

The picture can be anything from a historical building to a CD cover, according to Vodafone. Otello then returns information relevant to the picture to the mobile phone, just like a normal search engine. Vodafone is conducting a trial with German paper Bild. Readers can find out more about specially-marked articles by photographing them with their mobile phone camera and sending the image to Bild.

This is really a groundbreaking technology and lets see how vodaphone is able to do it. Vodaphone has not yet announced when this trial run will complete and “Otello” will be available to masses as a working solution.

How vodaphone will be able to do it ??

I am trying to figure out the answer to this question !! Success of “Otello” really doubtful because of the following points :

• Sending image via MMS has many limitations. One being the size of the picture. High resolution pictures cant be sent via mms.
• No information on how image will return text search result.
• Time constraint. Searching on Google with particular keywords, take less than a second to complete. How time efficient will be the image processing mechanism of “Otello”, could be a big question. I hope no human is involved.

No matter what, this will give search giants like Google , Microsoft , Yahoo some extra thought on next generation search technology. Also, service providers will get some extra bucks by making people use MMS .