Amazon Remembers

Amazon Remembers This week Amazon released a free iPhone app that provides more native access to the Amazon store experience. It has the expected features like product search, product data, reviews and of course, 1-click purchases. In addition, Amazon has introduced a new experimental feature called Amazon Remembers.

Amazon Remembers allows customers to snap photos of objects of interest and upload them to Amazon. Once uploaded, Amazon uses MTurk to identify the product and within minutes the app notifies customers with a link to the matching product. In my tests, an iPhone snap was identified as the iPod Touch (since Amazon doesn't sell iPhones), a Pepsi can returned a link to Coca Cola (since Pepsi is not sold on Amazon or some MTurker has a wicked sense of humor), a Palm Z22 was not identified, and a book was identified perfectly.

Get the app from the iTunes app store.

Comments

Rainman said…

Seems like a pretty useful app. One of my favorite apps that run on Android, Compare Everywhere, pulls up product info by barcode scanning. It retrieves a list of stores in and around the area that have that product and displays pricing info as well. However, the product DB itself seems quite limited, or at least that's what I inferred from my testing.

December 4, 2008 at 1:09 PM

Falcon said…

Lets say you don't have an iPhone, but you're one of those poor souls with just an iPod touch without a camera. Do you know of any way to to use the service, short of inviting a friend with an iPhone over?

December 6, 2008 at 7:04 PM

Anonymous said…

@Brat: The iPhone's fixed focus camera makes it useless for reading 1D bar codes. There are some apps that read the 2D bar codes (QR Codes).

@Falcon: AFAIK the iPhone is the only interface to upload images into the Amazon remembers system. When one logs into the regular web interface, Amazon only displays previously uploaded images; I can't find a way to upload images.

December 7, 2008 at 7:08 AM

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