CeBIT 2008: Vodafone Otello experiences first hiccup

4 March 2008 22:53 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Vodafone's Otello may have launched with big fanfare on Tuesday at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, but that didn't stop it experiencing its first major hiccup on day one.

The hiccup?

The programmers seem to have forgotten to include the German Chancellor Angela Merkel before showing it off to her at the show.

"I am not in the database", Merkel said when testing Vodafone's Otello, a search engine that uses images instead of words at the show.

"That's a major gap - please update", Merkel quipped.

Rather than use a word as a search term, Otello users can send images via MMS from their mobiles and the search service, which then returns the results to the user's phone as an "ordinary" search result.

Vodafone is running trials with a German newspaper that lets users find out more about stories by photographing the images that appear in the article and MMSing the images.

Full tags

Phones, Apps, Vodafone, Search engines, CeBIT2008