ShopSavvy Comes To The Iphone - Turn your Iphone into a Barcode Reader | Hacker News Reader

ShopSavvy Comes To The Iphone - Turn your Iphone into a Barcode Reader

blog.kelseygroup.com

5 pointskeltecp116 comments

I didn't realize the iPhone didn't have such a tool. I installed ShopSavvy the day I got my Droid, and I use it constantly.

More impressive, however, is Amazon's ability to find products based on a photo.

Interestingly, neither ShopSavvy nor Amazon correctly identify the Michael Crichton trade paperback "Prey" (both substitute a different product), but Amazon immediately found it when I used the 'photo search'. It does very well on book covers, even obscure/less popular ones. For instance, I got my Loeb book identified in about 5 minutes. I'm waiting for it to identify a highlighter (label visible), post-it notes, and Blistex (Label visible). Properly identifying non-packaged goods will be amazing.

Edit: it's identified each of my products perfectly using the "take a photo" so far. I haven't gone super obscure yet, but I haven't stayed just in the mainline.

The Amazon identify-by-photo feature uses Mechanical Turk (ie, real people). Try taking a photo of a handwritten note with something like "show me a book with an author whose name starts with K" (Nothing too complicated or tough to solve-the pay is very low per hit)

This can occasionally lead to amusing results when you send in photos of things which are not products, like people. A photo of a friend yielded the Freaks and Geeks DVD, and a photo of myself brought back the book "Asian slim secrets: the natural method for weight loss proven by billions of Asians" Note that these results vary a lot by who takes the MT hit; usually a picture of a face will yield something like a photo frame.

I figured the not-immediate matches were Mechanical Turk. But it's pulling results on some searches seemingly immediately after I snap the photo.

I'll have to try out your suggestions.

Some time ago, someone posted to HN a service that could basically find images based on an input image. It worked very well, so it could be that.

It has had a barcode reader / price comparisons based on the barcodes for some time now. http://redlaser.com/ In fact it was the #2 selling iPhone app for quite awhile.

Not only that, having used both, RedLaser is by far better at scanning.

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