Amazon iPhone App Uses Crowdsourcing for Product IDs

Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Amazon's new iPhone application has an experimental feature, dubbed Amazon Remembers, that blends product discovery and crowdsourcing. From the New York Times Bits blog:

The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon's Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals.

Human-generated Mechanical Turk results can be a wildcard -- and the lack of instant gratification is a disadvantage -- but this method could theoretically expand mobile product apps beyond text messages and barcode readers.

(Via Paul Miller's Twitter stream)

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