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.