SnapUp lets you shop on your iPhone by taking screenshots | Hacker News Reader

SnapUp lets you shop on your iPhone by taking screenshots

techcrunch.com

29 pointssatjot10 comments

If the tech just looks at the screenshot image, how does it have near full coverage of mobile web but has to train/fingerprint apps?

Good question- with Safari, we use the visible domain to help score the confidence for mobile websites. For native apps, we don't have any such "easy" confidence boost. So we have to fingerprint the app based on different features present in the image that is captured.

The system is computer vision / machine learning based, so even on novel sites, it will get better over time with more usage and training. We've trained it up for a bunch of the most popular sites already though.

Does this make sense?

Sounds impressive. Do you have a pre-existing product database that you match them up to or do you just create products on the fly?

We do our own searching and wrote our own crawlers. Does that answer your question?

It does indeed. I'm very impressed. Keep up the good work!

I would strongly guess it's a fixed set of product images they're training against, possibly attained by massive scraping. Another part of training or processing might consist of a reverse image search API, like TinEye, and gathering metadata from the pages containing the result images.

Do I have to upload the pics manually?

No, it detects the screenshots as you take them. (I helped build the app)

So every screenshot I take on my iPhone is automatically imported into SnapUp / sent to your server?

No, we do some client-side prefiltering to ignore non-products, and we also do some more extensive server-side filtering. We also allow you to cancel snap processing, as well as go into an "Ignore new snaps" mode via the settings in the app. Also, the upload only happens when the app is foregrounded, giving you further control.

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