There are some rudimentary scanning functions now available in cell phones and those features should improve over time.

It means using the camera phone not as a picture-taker, but as a scanner capturing metadata about products or services related to objects around us. I think we’ll see more of this in coming years.

I think the scanning functions open up some interesting possibilities to content suppliers as well as hardware manufacturers and therefore will be promoted.

Imagine walking through the park and aiming your camera phone at a data tag on a statue. It directs your phone’s browser to a Web page about a historic building that used to stand there,...

Mobile media promises to be a major topic of discussion, as operators are looking for the next big thing to entice customers to use 3G networks.

But these applications are all proprietary. A real market for this requires some standardization, and for marketers, operators, and handset vendors to be ‘on the same page’.