Amazon iPhone Application Lets You Shop by Snapping a Picture   - 1,101 Views,

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Amazon Remembers is a new iPhone application that lets you send a picture of anything to Amazon, and if it is at all available for sale within Amazon’s huge network of products, they will send you a link to purchase it within 24 hours.

Pretty cool, eh?

But what is perhaps even more interesting than the application is how it works: by people power. Amazon is using their vast Mechanical Turk population - the Turkforce - to find these products by hand!

For those not familiar with the Amazon Mechanical Turk service, it is Amazon’s question and answer service, and, as we wrote last year, “Questions you ask the Amazon Mechanical Turk question and answer machine are called “HITs” (Human Intelligence Task), and you create HITs through a simple form. You create your question, and then say how much you are willing to pay for the answer - you can accept an answer from just one person, or from several.”

Put another way, when you use Amazon Remembers from your iPhone, you send a picture in to Amazon, and a live human pores over all of the Amazon offerings to find a match, and sends you the link so that you can buy it.

Wonder if they’ll get many requests for these?

Amazon iPhone Application Lets You Shop by Snapping a Picture

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