Unlikely innovator USAA Bank has pushed the bar in the financial industry and in mobile banking by allowing customers to remove one of the final paper roadblocks in an otherwise fully digital banking system: depositing a check. USAA Bank will now let customers deposit a check by taking a picture on their iphone and sending it in via a mobile app.
The point-shoot-submit application model is nothing new. QR Codes have been around since 1994, but still haven’t really caught on in North America. Now, slick smartphones like the iPhone are making applications like this more consumer friendly and easier to implement.
So I asked Organics to get creative about the future of mobile applications. It might be bank deposits today, but what about tomorrow? What do we want our phones to be able to do next:

• Take a picture of notes on a whiteboard and be able to send it to a server or app that turns it into a text file and lets me distribute it to the team
• Take a picture of a house for sale or rent to get more info instead of having to call the agent or go to a website. This could be done with a QR code in the “for sale/rent” sign
• Have a ‘municipal complaint app’ similar to the one they have in Boston. Take a photo of a street light that needs fixing, a park that needs cleaning etc and send it to the city …or with complaints/nuisance that can’t necessarily be solved by the city, be able to send pictures to other groups, companies, associations and volunteers
• Have friends in my mobile pics automatically tagged through facial recognition (with the option of setting privacy to disable that)
• Take a photo of a rash, cut, bruise, swelling or any visible symptom and send it to my doctor or a webMD-like site to get instant feedback on whether I (or my kid) need stitches, etc or can give me a diagnosis and prescribe a remedy
• Take a photo of a flower or plant while on a walk and get the name/species, characteristics about what it needs to grow and save it to a file that auto organizes all my favorite flowers by shade, sun, height, etc so I can plan my yard landscape
• Somehow take a picture of the food I’m eating in order to keep a daily calorie count. I don’t know how the image identification could work considering foods look so different, perhaps this just starts with CPG food with barcodes and clearly defined “packaging”
• Take a picture of my face in order to get hairstyle/makeup/beauty care recommendations from a high end beauty brand while I’m in the store or at the salon

Thanks to Karri Ojanen and Sarah Jo Sautter for the application ideas and Ted Hoot for the mobile banking link.
Marta Strickland