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Over the last few years, a number of companies have spent a lot of time and money thinking up ways to get cell phone and smartphone owners to use their cameras for more than just taking pictures and video. Or, in other words, monetize these devices in a way all involved (save the consumer) can earn additional revenue. The latest, called Point&Find, comes from the worldwide cell phone leader itself, Nokia.

The point of Point&Find is to allow folks to use their mobile phone's camera to find out more about something they’re interested in—through image processing, GPS positioning and artificial intelligence. Snap a picture of an object, say a CD or a film poster, to automatically receive purchase options for the former and get show times or buy tickets for the latter, for instance.

It would seem there are numerous applications for this technology. For example, Nokia says Point&Find can even be uses to translate text (see image). Simply take a picture of a group of words on menu at a restaurant in a foreign country to receive a translation in your native language.

Cell phones and smartphones are getting more powerful and capable, but they don't have nearly enough processing power to support an application like Point&Find run. That's why the technology sends images to servers on the backend for decoding and processing.

Nokia isn't the first company with this concept.

For instance, a company called ActiveSymbols, a subsidiary of Logicalis, started demonstrating what it calls visual search technology a couple of years ago. With visual search, Active Symbols extended technology used for the recognition of 1D and 2D barcodes to full 3D images.

As with Point&Click, ActiveSymbols' technology doesn't deal with images on a phone itself but on a remote server. And, as a picture is decoded and processed, the server matches it to a brand or a set of predefined tasks and services.

As for Nokia's Point&Shoot, it's been reported a prototype version will find its way to Nokia's N95 smartphone.