Scan an Ad With a Camera Phone

There doesn't seem to be one big trend at this year's DemoMobile, but much of what's interesting involves cell phones--and two companies are showing off similar technologies for using a camera phone to integrate printed magazines with the digital world.

Mobot and Digimarc both let you take a snapshot of an ad or other content in a specially-prepared magazine or other print item; they then transmit the picture to a server, analyze it and identify it, then route you towards related information or shopping opportunities.

A more cynical pundit than yours truly would compare all this to the embarassingly bad and justly unsuccessful Internet-connected bar code scanner called the CueCat, which tried to do something similar a few years ago. But the CueCat required a hardware device and software package that didn't work very well, and since it was a PC peripheral, it assumed that you read magazines while plopped in front of a computer. Mobot and Digimarc's technologies sidestep thosee issues, since they use a mobile device you already own as the scanner.

That still leaves the question of whther it's easier for advertisers and publishers simply to print URLs for folks who want to hop online after reading something in print...