Tired of searching the Internet with text? Vodafone launched a new service in Germany this week that allows cell phone users to search for and receive information from photographs.

JOCHEN HERTLE, Otello, Vodafone Germany
"What we do is feed into the search engine images, images that you take with your cell phone of real objects in the real world. The system will respond in any meaningful manner depending on the context. So the response could be information, an Internet page where you purchase goods, any type of response that is useful for the user in the context."

A service was launched on Monday with Bild, Germany's top-selling newspaper, that offers readers the chance to view videos related to stories in the paper. Cell phone users just take a photo of a picture in the paper, send it by MMS to 42-42 and quickly receive a link to download the video.

JOCHEN HERTLE, Otello, Vodafone Germany
"Any newspaper can use the service. They tell us which pages of the newspaper they want to enable for Otello image-based search and that's what we do. So if the users then takes a photo of that particular article or photo in the newspaper the newspaper can send back appropriate responses like information or videos in realtime."

Vodafone has also populated a database with pictures of about 10,000 famous buildings in Germany. Users can take a picture of a building and get back a link to the respective Wikipedia page and there's also a database of the top 500 best-selling CDs. A picture is all that's needed to jump to a link from which a ringtone can be purchased.

The service is accessible from any of Germany's four mobile networks and -- perhaps best of all -- users pay only the price of the data transmission.

At Cebit 2008 in Hanover, Germany, this is Martyn Williams, IDG News Service.