Amazon expands mobile/iPhone capabilities.

I haven't seen this covered in the ecommerce World, but it is in the startup press.  Earlier this week, Amazon acquired the startup Snaptell.  Snaptell had a free app for the iPhone and Android that allowed you to take a picture of a random product, have it identified and then price shopped online.

The amount of the acquisition wasn't disclosed, but snaptell had raised $4m so I suspect the valuation was at least 2x that if not more.

Amazon already has a great mobile app with a similar 'remember' feature.  In a WSJ piece, an Amazon spokesperson said:

Amazon will continue to "work in innovations in search technologies and enabling visual shopping on a range of mobile devices and platforms," said a company spokeswoman. "It's very early days for image recognition based search technology and we believe there is a lot of innovation in visual product search ahead of us."

If you want to read/learn more here are some resources:

• Snaptell blog  
  
• TechCrunch  
• WSJ article (subscription required) 

 If you want to see snaptell in action, I found this Youtube video embedded after the SeekingAlpha blurb:

SeekingAlpha Disclosure- I am long Google and Amazon.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor

  

Comments

[Rick]

Pretty awesome stuff! ...Taking a picture of the item and retrieving results, what will they think of next?

We been very interested in the Google Android OS and G1 phone. As a matter of fact most of our staff run around with a G1 holstered to their hip.

One day a few months ago a shrilling screen came from our warehouse, “Oh My God!” Several of us rushed out expecting to find a crushed body as a result of a runaway forklift or some similar catastrophe. Nothing like that was found – One of the guys decided to use a FREE barcode scan app he downloaded to his G1 phone and scan one of the bar codes on a fuel pump box – the results where unexpected I guess – hence the scream of excitement. Our fuel pump appeared in the scan results along with the all the competition neatly sorted with least expensive first (Our product of coarse). The results displayed this item on Google Shopping, Amazon, a few brick and mortar stores along with a few other comparison shopping sites that accept UPC data. The phone presented the option of purchasing the item on-line on the spot from Amazon or our on-line store based on the Google base feed or find the closest brick and mortar store that stocks the item along with driving directions using GPS and Google maps.

The possibilities really get your mind going. It seems like quite a stretch for a person to shop for auto parts by scanning a bar code on a box. But the potential cannot be ignored based on the unrealized possibilities and not knowing for sure about consumer shopping habits.

Scanning in the early days (10 months ago):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwhdXJuiO48

Here are some of the latest enhancements added by Google and Google Shopping:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y20cmESMZWo

Just thoughts….

[Mitch Ratcliffe]

Except for the opportunity to take out a potential competitor, I don't see the logic in this acquisition because the Amazon Remembers application does the same thing—and across a wider range of product categories (see this posting about it from last December).

Snapping a pic of a media title was the no-brainer function in Amazon Remembers, so why take this out, except to reduce the number of buying options in SnapTell to just Amazon? I hope someone at Amazon did this because they were seeing a lot of sales volume through SnapTell and not simply to pay a premium on a potential competitor's technology.

Perhaps this app does the product recognition without human intervention (Remember uses the Mechanical Turk to let people ID products) in order to reduce costs, but reading the title or recognizing the cover of a book, CD or DVD isn't much of an innovation. This seems like a move toward reduced competition.