Dec 3, 2008 09:50 AM
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Today, Amazon launched an iPhone app that'll exist solely to make buying crap easier. Its killer, buy-more-crap feature? Take a picture of anything, and Amazon'll shoot you the product page to waste money on it.
So how does this economy-stoking magic app work? A complex, supremely intelligent algorithm that can analyze pixels and determine just what it is you want to buy? Gremlins? Google? Actually, if you guessed gremlins, you almost on the money.
When you upload a photo, Amazon's living, breathing Mechanical Turk workers (so-named for one of the first "robots") try to match the photo up to products for sale on Amazon.com. You'll get results back in 5 minutes to 24 hours. The giant kink, obviously, is the potential for human error—how will they tell one giant black HDTV from another, for instance, especially with the iPhone's crappy camera?
Normally, it'd be the perfect time to launch this kind of app—the holiday season—but with the financiapocalypse, I sorta wonder how many George Bush bobbleheads this thing is gonna sell. [iTunes via Bits]
Send an email to matt buchanan, the author of this post, at matt@gizmodo.com.
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