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Nokia Prepares Onslaught Of Mobile Location Applications

Nokia is busily preparing a slew of new location-based applications designed to take advantage of its acquisition of Navteq. Here is a sneak peak at one of these new applications.

The application in question, called Point&Find, lets users take a picture of an item with their camera phone and then locate the item in question and/or buy it online:

Dubbed Point&Find, the technology incorporates numerous elements, including GPS positioning, image recognition and artificial intelligence algorithms. However, the processing required to work out what you just snapped an image of will apparently be done on your network provider’s servers.

After snapping, say, a t-shirt in a shop window, or a film poster, the handset will connect to the internet and, hopefully, present the user with a selection of online purchase options or movie reviews.

By combining image processing and GPS, this application takes location to a whole new level and shows the kinds of new services that can be created with location. Point&Find is an application that wouldn't exist on the desktop (it would be clunky at best), but it makes perfect sense on mobile phones. And it can exist only because of GPS and location. This is a sign of more things to come this year.

What do you think? Does Point&Find look like the kind of application you would use? What other types of mobile applications would you like to see this year?

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