Serendipity35

This will either give you a technology thrill, or scare you.

There's a new technology out there that allows you in your travels to do some amazing things. Let's say you see a logo but can't identify it. Take a picture with your phone and use the picture as a search "term." It tells you the company name and website. Take a picture of a building, landmark, painting, book cover, wine bottle label or any object and use them as search terms. If it can find the image online, it can tell you "what it is."

What is this technology? It's the new Google Goggles service.



It takes a picture from your phone, analyzes it, turns it into a search query, and gives you links that might explain what the camera was seeing.

Right now, it works on phones using Google Android, but it will be on iPhones and other smartphones eventually.

The scary part is that it is designed to be so sensitive, and ultimately with facial-recognition, that it should also work on people too. See person, take picture, submit, and (if their photo is online) it finds them - on their blog, or Facebook or...

That part isn't quite here yet, but people are already talking about it as a tool for stalkers and privacy invaders.

Google knows that too. At a recent Le Web conference, people from Google said that they need to address the implications of the facial-recognition part of the new tool before it is released.

Google already has a mobile photo-sharing component that allows you to send images to Facebook and Picasa (not Flickr as of now) so the connections are huge.

Amazing. And scary.

Google Goggles is a visual search app for Android phones. Instead of using words, take a picture of an object with your camera phone: we attempt to recognize the object, and return relevant search results. Goggles also provides information about businesses near you by displaying their names directly in the camera preview.