I was thinking about an application that could be very handy when reading a book or similar… you can see it in a mock-up at the bottom…

The steps are the ones depicted in the mock-up

1) empty app doing nothing

2) you have used the iPhone camera to take a photo of a page where there’s a word you don’t know the meaning (English is not my natural language, so it happens often…) – here we could have to solve several other problems: focus, lighting, etc…

3) the app process the image and isolate the words… the red lines makes a grid that separate them…

4) you can just tap on a word and click on one of the green buttons on the bottom to choose the action… (Defina, Search, Save Note)… the app may ask you additional info depending on the action you choose…

5) if you have chosen “Define” it just sends the part of the picture you have selected to server part of the application that have some kind of OCR – the server part should have to be open somewhere in your network, maybe your laptop (we may think that a connection has already been made by mean of Bonjour or other technology). The server part process the image, find the definition of the word and send it back to the app on your iPhone…

Additional ideas: this could be used to collect notes, urls from magazines, addresses…

Problems:
lighting and focus for taking the picture?
which kind of OCR app?