Convergence of Visual Data & Mobile Solutions

Many mobile phones today have cameras and quite a few mobile entertainment applications exist, that invoke the camera facility. It is now the turn of mobile enterprise solutions to utilize the camera phone for business use. Applications can control the camera, capture a picture and then pass it along with other information to a central server for processing. All along, the picture is treated like another data item and thus catalogued in a database for easy retrieval later. Mobile photo applications are used by insurance claims inspectors for visually recording a vehicle’s condition, by marketing people to decide on how to place consumer products on retail shelves, by loan sales persons to capture documents; and the list can go on, encompassing any application where a visual record needs to be taken for processing. An innovative application I came across was one where barcodes on redemption vouchers are read, verified and accounted for immediately, with just an ordinary camera phone instead of an expensive portable barcode reader. It is just a matter of time that mobile photo applications will become common-place in the enterprise world.