Think of text, photos and videos on the Internet as a collection of content sitting on various interconnected servers. Consumers can access the content through machines designed in the 1970s and 1980s, during a time when the world relied on relatively large computing platforms comprised of keyboard, mouse and computer monitor. Since then, we have seen many advances in interactivity, the rich display and complexity of the content such as adding video and Web 2.0 functions. People, however, still get that content primarily through a URL/Web address.

A new revolution on the horizon makes the mobile platform a large, if not predominant, mechanism for accessing Internet content. We've seen how compelling the mobile interface is for voice as the percentage of calls on mobile phones increase, and percentage on wireline phones decrease. Mobile Internet access is poised to follow this trend, but truly, how many of us actually go to the Web address printed in an advertisement on a billboard or on a box of Cheerios, Corn Flakes or Special K?

A few key issues exist such as the display isn't a big monitor and a nice big keyboard to type in a Web address doesn't exist. Displays are improving, as the Apple iPhone demonstrates. The mobile device has become nearly all screen. However, as good as keyboards are on mobile devices, huge opportunities exist to rethink how end-users discover and retrieve content. Mobility provides the answer: use the user's environment to key into content. For example, my phone can trigger content from a product image on a billboard advertisement.

One well understood method is covered in this publication regularly"radio frequency identification technology. Of course this requires companies to implement RFID readers in consumer-grade mobile devices and RFID tags placed into the environment. An alternative is to retrieve content through a trigger in existing cameras on phones. Simple examples of this called QR Codes are becoming very popular in some locations around the globe such as Japan. QR Codes are simple bar codes. If you have the right phone and are motivated you can try this by downloading a client for your phone from a site like Kaywa. Coding a web address into a bar code is easy through various tools including the Kaywa QR-Code generator as well. This is only the first step for where technology is going.

A significant advancement in technology provides instant interactivity with network content. It is called mobile augmented reality. This technology combines real-world data with computer-generated data to "augment" the real-world experience for consumers. Examples of the non-mobile version abound in controlled environments for television such as the yellow lines placed on football fields or the replacement of advertisements around the field at soccer games.

Mobile augmented reality takes the same base technology and moves it out of the controlled environments and off of our television sets. With augmented reality, a Web address isn't encoded in a bar code. Instead, the picture is interpreted and information superimposed on a physical object in real time.

Imagine for example being able to look at a picture through the video camera on your phone and see not a static image but a full motion video where that picture "comes to life." The picture below shows what you might see if you were to look at an advertisement through your phone.

The effect is somewhat like the pictures in "Harry Potter," where the pictures aren't static, they move. This augmentation of reality with a moving picture can be used in magazine ads or on billboards, for instance.