Future Technologies
Is ‘Internet of Things’ already under our noses?
By Mike on 17 July 2008
INTERNATIONAL – There are some ties to the physical world that we just can’t seem to shake off, like the humble old business card. Appreciating that, the new Multiscanner business card reader built into the E71 and E66 enables you to take a photo of card and then squirt the info electronically into your address book. You might need to change the odd bit of info here or there – the tech used is called Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and can sometimes be more of an art than a hard science – but it will do the bulk of the heavy lifting for you.
This got me thinking. Is this the first evidence of the concept of Internet of Things in day-to-day action – using your mobile device to suck information from real-world and convert it into a useful digital resource at a most basic level.
Sure, the idea of the Internet of Things, which is being worked on by the Nokia Research Centre, extends far beyond this collaborating technologies such as GPS, fast data connections and beyond, nonetheless, as you witness a real object being hocus-pocussed onto your phone into a manipulatable digital form. It’s a subtle piece of software, but I believe hugely significant, even though the technology has been out there for a while.
What do you think? Is the business card reader a taste of a mobile future you can associate with and get excited about? Let us know using the comments below.
Photo from Simon Zirkunow
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Tags | Business card reader, conversations, E66, e71, Internet of things, Multiscanner, Nokia
July 18th, 2008 at 5:22 am
I think that an internet of things is something that people are ready for, but there has not been enough of a push towards this that has either not had a propietory solution needing some level of education and buy-in, or it has been demonstrated as so sci-fi that it still feels impossible. Between evangelists and companies, a massive push needs to happen for this to become reality.
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July 20th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
The multiscanner that comes with the E71 is great, sadly it comes installed on the memory card, meaning if like me, you corrupted your memory card and reformatted it, you will lose it.
There is currently no way to re-download it from Nokia
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October 25th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
I have my all data/software which were stored in card. Out of them, i hv downloaded almost every software except multiscanner. Can I get multiscanner software ?
Pl help
regds
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