A9.com Awakens
July 19, 2009
My newsreader gonged and I read “Image Recognition Startup SnapTell Acquired by Amazon Subsidiary A9.com” in TechCrunch. I remember when A9 was under the watchful eye of Udi Manber. Mr. Manber, search wizard blew out of Burlingame and settled in Google’s Mountain View cube farm. A9.com dropped off my radar as Google added features and A9.com became less interesting to me. How tough would it be to retrieve Kindle books with tags such as “in print”, not the jumbled mess I get when looking for eBooks. Sigh.
Well, TechCrunch reported:
SnapTell’s visual product search technology lets users take a photo of the cover of any CD, DVD, book, or video game, and the technology will automatically identify the product and find ratings and pricing information online from Google, Amazon, eBay and more. The company has a database of about 5 million+ products. SnapTell launched popular apps
for both the iPhone and Android. SnapTell’s free iPhone app, in particular, was a pretty nifty tool, letting users not only get instant reviews of a product, but also providing local and online price comparisons through TheFind,
Perhaps A9.com will enhance other areas of its technology as well.
Stephen Arnold, July 19, 2009
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Will SnapTell under A9/Amazon still point toward other sites for purchase, or will SnapTell results favor Amazon?