• "See it" is an image recognition application that works with your phone's camera. To use this service, you point the camera at any company's logo and snap a picture to get exclusive content from that company. The content could be mobile discounts and coupons or simply information about some sort of special promotion.
• "Say it" is a voice recognition search service, similar to that of Google's mobile app which lets you speak your query into the phone. Getfugu's web site recommends you use this service "if a logo isn't handy." You can either say brand names or you can say generic keywords like "pizza" or "ATM." Either way, the service isn't really designed as a Google replacement - it's designed to help you find things when you're out and about.
• "Find it" is Getfugu's location-based service which taps into the GPS of your phone to return results based on proximity. It's unclear as to whether this service will work in conjunction with the voice search or whether it will be a standalone service. 
• "Get it" refers to Getfugu's unique search service called "hot-spotting." This function is limited to touchscreen devices and involves interactive video content. When you watch a video on your phone, any item within the video can be "hot-spot enabled" so that when it's touched, you're offered more information about that item and given a chance to purchase it.

Not Just a Search Tool

As to where these videos come from, it appears that Getfugu will distribute those themselves along with games and ringtones and other mobile content. Yes, you see, Getfugu doesn't just want to be a mobile search tool, they want to be a mobile content distribution platform as well.

But wait, there's more! When you watch mobile ads on Getfugu's service, you can apparently earn cash for doing so. After earning a bunch of cash for being the good little consumer that you are, you can then use your customized Getfugu debit card to spend the money. Yes, a debit card. You see, Getfugu's sort of like a bank, too.

As to how Getfugu plans to make money? It's all dependent on advertisers. Small businesses pay $9.99 and businesses with 10 or more employees (apparently that's a big business now?) pay $99 per month to get their logo or a single keyword in the Getfugu search engine. For each keyword or additional logo, the company will have to pay those same fees again. In the mobile hot-spotting service, revenue is split 50/50 with the advertiser.

Is This Really Going to Work?

We think it's great that Getfugu is attempting to bundle the different types of searches into one app in order to make it easier to find local content and we especially love the fact that they're incorporating an augmented reality application ("see it") in the mix. That being said, it seems like the service is overly dependent on advertisers to make things work and without their involvement, will there even be any search results displayed? If not, then the service will immediately pale to that of Google Maps, for instance, which can instantly show businesses, their proximity to you, and directions. You may not get coupons with Google Maps, but at least you get a comprehensive listing.

Besides the immediate challenge of dealing with the Google factor, Getfugu confuses us. What exactly do they want to be? A search app? A place to get games, ringtones, and videos? A pay-you-to-watch-ads service? You don't often see those offerings combined in one application (and probably for good reason). Their "we're all that and the kitchen sink, too" offering may be just a bit too ambitious.

Still, we guess we'll reserve our final judgment until the service actually launches next month. If you want to be notified when that occurs along with us, there's a sign-up form on the Getfugu web site.

The concept behind Zcapes is somewhat reminiscent of the mobile social network Brightkite's feature called "placestreams." With Brightkite, users can post text and images surrounding a particular place or event directly from their mobile phone. Zcapes is very similar in concept - except instead of being a social network whose primary goal is connecting you to other users, a Zcape page is just the placestream, nothing more. However, Zcape pages aren't limited to a physical place in the real world or an event like a conference or concert. They can also be created for an activity, like "watching the Oscars" or a group - like your coworkers, for example. The pages you create can be set to public or private, as you choose.

If you want to tap into conversations surrounding a particular keyword, the service could easily do that. However, it's not limited to web chatter alone. In addition to tracking the real-time web of Twitter updates and Flickr uploads, the service can also track RSS feeds while letting you integrate messaging options, text boxes, images, polls, RSVPs, maps of a particular location, and other features that a traditional blog might have right into your Zcape page. (You can see Zcape in action by checking out this one for ReadWriteWeb: http://rww.zcapes.com or this one for SmartMobs, which recently introduced the service to us.)

How To Share Your Creation

Once you have created a Zcape of your own, you can share it via email, Twitter, or even QR code. Upon creation, the service provides an image of a QR barcode which you could easily stick somewhere in the real world - especially if you had one of these portable, ink-free photo/sticker printers. Make sure to save the image right way, though, because once we left that final page of the creation process, we had trouble finding the sharing options again.

To interact with the Zcapes created by others, you'll need to sign up for a free account. You can then "Favorite" Zcapes by clicking on "Love this!" which is found at the bottom of all Zcape pages. The pages themselves are designed to be viewed from a mobile phone, not a desktop/laptop PC, as you can see from the image below, captured on a laptop.

Where Does Zcapes Fit In?

To understand where exactly a product like Zcapes fits in, you can refer to the following diagram, which will either simplify the concept for you or confuse you, depending on how well you interpret diagrams!:

Zcapes was founded by Raimo van der Klein, Claire Boonstra and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, who are mobile service architects from a strategic creative consultancy called SPRXmobile based in Amsterdam. Together with their technical partner Triple IT, they built this service which launched last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

For more information about Internet-connected "things", see the following articles: "5 Companies Building an Internet of Things" and "The Next Node on the Net: Your Car!"

There are obviously numerous potential applications for such a technology. On the MOBVIS homepage, they offer up some scenarios for how their application could be used, including the following:

Tourism/Augmented City Maps: The MOBVIS technology could be used to inform visitors about the objects in an area be them buildings or landmarks. The images could also be annotated with additional information like history, event information, or information about nearby shops.

Visual Localization: For phones without GPS technology, triangulation could be combined with the computer vision technology to locate a user's position and orientation in a manner that would be comparable to GPS and just as accurate.

Motion Estimation: Also comparable to GPS, MOBVIS could enable continuous position updates to determine the location of objects in motion as well as their speed.

Incremental Map Updates: MOBVIS supports incremental updating of maps which would allow for the automated authoring of the urban infrastructure. No longer would Google need to send their vans around taking pictures of streets - the data could be uploaded from users' phones as they took their photos.

Picture-Driven Search Engine: Because the mobile phone could now "see" the surrounding landscape, the world - reality - becomes the backdrop for a sort of picture-driven search engine in which the objects in the world are all hyperlinked and annotated like a real-life semantic web.

How It Works

The MOBVIS system begins with a pre-populated database of geo-referenced panoramas (such as Google's Street View, perhaps). The objects in the images are then manually annotated with information. Once that's complete, the system is ready for search queries from mobile users. After a user takes a picture, MOBVIS compares the photo to the photos in its database and returns the relevant links.

The challenge here is getting a mobile phone picture to match up with the more pristine photos found in the database. The database photos would likely be clear, crisp, and detailed, but a user's photo could be grainy, taken on a dark and cloudy day, or taken from an odd angle.

The MOBVIS system's main strength comes from its feature-matching algorithm developed by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, one of the partners of the project. This algorithm can very accurately detect minute differences between similar objects. In real-world tests, it's reported that this system was highly accurate, detecting the right building 80 percent of the time.

Aleš Leonardis, head of the Ljubljana team, believes that number can be improved, too. He also notes that that the system, though not always right, was never wrong. "It was remarkable that there were no false positives," he says. "Sometimes the system couldn't identify a building, but it never put the incorrect link on a building."

You can read more about the research here on the MOBVIS project's homepage.