REVIEW: Thrrum MMS cameraphone search returns blurry results

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Yay or Nay. Every week we’ll review a new wireless application or service from the user’s point of view, with the goal of highlighting what works and what doesn’t. If you wish to submit your application or service for review, please contact us at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
Application: Thrrum MMS Search
Running on: Moto Razr running on Sprint Nextel
Yay: Having your cameraphone images scanned, translated and applied to a Web search is pretty neat.
Nay: Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a practical application – or any application whatsoever – for this neat technology. Further, the vast majority of results returned by Thrrum were completely unrelated to what we were searching for.
We say: Thrrum appears to be a technology desperately in search of a problem. Without a problem to solve, it just sort of sits there.
Review: 23half Inc. earlier this month announced the availability of its Thrrum MMS Search for Sprint Nextel subscribers. The company said Thrrum MMS Search “enables cameraphone users to find and browse information related to their physical environment using the picture messaging service integrated into their phones.”
Essentially, users take a picture with their cameraphones and send the picture to m@thrrum.com. The service then scans the image for readable text, and takes that text and performs a Web search with it. It then sends you the results via a WAP link inside a text message.
The service is free aside from carrier messaging charges.
We thought that was a pretty neat idea. Indeed, K. Gopalakrishnan, CEO of 23half, summed it up nicely: “With Thrrum, any text that you see around you becomes a hyperlink that can be ‘clicked’ upon with your cameraphone.”
Further, we were pleased to see the service unabashedly relies on an ad-based business model. On clicking the WAP link inside the Thrrum text message, we were first taken to a screen with an advertisement for “Charity Navigator,” whatever that is (the advertisement did not have a link for more information). We had to “click here to continue” to get to our search results.
Unfortunately, Thrrum MMS Search stumbled badly when it came to actually providing useful information. Some of our pictures returned this message: “That picture couldn’t be used,” which we figured was due to our relatively poor cameraphone resolution (1.3 megapixels).
But when the service did return results, we couldn’t find much value anyway. A photo of one of the lead stories in our Sunday paper returned links to the Phi Kappa Phi honor society (as far as we could tell, the story had nothing to do with this society). Another search, of the cover of this week’s RCR Wireless News magazine, returned this result: “EWS: Summary for ISHARE MSCI SINGAPOR,” from Yahoo Finance. We’re not really sure what to make of that.
The only search that seemed to return a result that was at least related to the subject matter was a picture of the cover of the “Joy of Cooking” book, which returned a link to cooking.com. At least this result was related to the subject in the picture, but we couldn’t think of a use for this. If we wanted information on cooking or recipes, wouldn’t we just type that into Google’s mobile Web site, or perhaps Opera Mini’s search tool?
After interacting with the Thrrum MMS Search for several days, we still could not think reason to actually use the service over something like Opera Mini or ChaCha. We enjoyed the novelty of Thrrum MMS Search, but were left hoping in vain for functional search results.