It seems not a day goes by when one company or another doesn’t release an iPhone app intended to make us part with our cash. Amazon is the latest to take this approach, releasing its iPhone app for free in the hopes that iPhone users everywhere will buy more stuff they don’t need, and can’t afford anyway.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re currently in a recession. That includes you, whether you’re resident in America, Asia, or Europe, and whether you’re actually feeling the effects or not. So retailers around the world are having to increase their efforts to make us buy more products.

One of the most obvious ways of doing this, and reaching a whole new demographic in the process, is to release an iPhone app, which is exactly what Amazon has just done. The free for iPhone and iPod Touch users application is a pretty straightforward affair, except for one ingenious, and potentially wallet-busting element.

The Amazon iPhone app allows users to browse the full range of products available to buy on Amazon, all from the comfort of their iPhone or iPod Touch. So far, so very ordinary. But this does offer users the chance to compare online prices while out shopping, and with the holiday season now upon us, that won’t be very popular with offline retailers.

But the one feature of this app grabbing all the headlines is Amazon Remembers. This tool allows iPhone and iPod Touch users the chance to take a photo of any product they see in the real world, upload it to Amazon, which will then match the product for one on Amazon.com. Brilliant, if indeed it actually works.

Rather than being a highly technical process where a photo is analyzed pixel by pixel until an exact match is found, Amazon Remembers relies on humans, which we know can be less than reliable. The New York Times explains that the photos will be matched to appropriate products by the freelancers working at the Amazon Mechanical Turk project.

This part of the Amazon iPhone app is being described as “experimental”, and I can see why with human error obviously set to play a part. The iPhone’s camera isn’t exactly the highest-rated in the world, so I can see many people being sent details of completely the wrong product. Then again, they might find it to be a better alternative and buy it anyway, so Amazon still wins out in the end.

Related:

Entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 5:02 pm under Free Apps, News, Opinion, iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
Stumble It!