Archive for August 4th 2009

Playing with Amazon Remembers

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

I discovered this feature on iPhone’s Amazon.com. It’s an experimental featured utilize visual recognition. How does it work? You take a photo of an object, the photo get uploaded to your Amazon account. Minutes later, an email is sent to you with item Amazon recommends to you based on the photo you took.

I was skeptical about the feature, probably because my experience with features marked as experimental or beta normally resulting disappointment.

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Using my iphone, I took 3 random pictures. The first one was a piggie illustration on my tote bag. Amazon recommended me what appears to be a children’s book Patches: Lost And Found. The kidish style of the piggie illustration was interpreted to a child’s item, and somehow the image was correctly identified to be a patch. Waw, this feature is not too shabby.

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Second picture is a poster displaying many elaborate traditional architecture entrances in Jerusalem. The matched item for this one is a Jerusalem (West Jerusalem Walls) Art Poster Print – 11. Once again it was relevant to the photo, but less intriguing.

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The 3rd image was a screenshot of an email newsletter sent by an online arts & crafts store called Etsy. And the matching item was a book titled 101 Ways to Market Your Online Jewelry Shop: Free and Cheap Ways to Market, Promote, Advertise, and Increase Traffic to Your Online or Etsy Jewelry Shop and Sell Your Jewelry Now. At first I was jaw droopingly impressed. Then I realized character recognition might be reasonably easy to achieve. But still I thought that was cool.

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