SnapTell Blog

SnapTell+Popular Science -- Best Of What's New

Hustle off to the newsstand and grab a copy of the December issue of Popular Science magazine, which features the 21st annual "Best of What's New" review. The magazine describes it as "a celebration of our wildest technological dreams" and spotlights dozens of "long awaited or completely unexpected, (and) equally amazing" recent scientific and engineering breakthroughs.

Even better: Popular Science used SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get solution to make the entire Best Of What's New section interactive -- just use your camera phone to snap a picture of any of the pages (see the magazine for specifics), send the image to [email protected] (AT&T, Verizon and Alltell users can send via shortcode 070707) -- and you'll get a spiffy digital image of a vintage Popular Science cover, an instant response from some of the Best Of What's New award-winning companies, and a chance to win a Garmin nüvi 500 GPS device.

SnapTell Explorer for Everyone (almost)

People have been asking us if we'll be releasing the SnapTell Explorer app, currently available for iPhones, for other platforms such as Google's Android and Windows Mobile.

The answer is yes -- we already have beta versions for Android and Windows Mobile in development, and will soon release them. We anticipate that we'll have them ready for download in time to assist you in finding the perfect gift for everyone during the Holiday 2008 shopping season (for everyone but those super organized types who finished their shopping way back in August, anyway.)

Thanks so much for your interest, and stay tuned to this blog for news on the forthcoming SnapTell Explorer releases.

TechCrunch Reviews SnapTell Explorer

TechCrunch has this to say about our iPhone SnapTell Explorer app:

If you have an iPhone, you’ll probably want to check out SnapTell Explorer, a free application now available on the App Store. The premise is simple: take a photo of the cover of any CD, DVD, book, or video game, and the application will automatically identify the product and find ratings and pricing information online.

I was skeptical when I first saw the app - the iPhone has had difficulty with image processing for barcodes, and most image recognitions systems I’ve tried on other platforms have been iffy at best. But SnapTell just works. Every time.

The app correctly identified just about everything I threw at it: Xbox games, Pocketbook O’Reilly manuals, The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Wisdom, Kurt Vonegut novels, and a number of more obscure books (yes, it worked on The Twinkies Cookbook). It even managed to ID a copy of Civilization 4, despite the fact that it was covered in obnoxious price tags and stickers. I actually tried to mess it up by taking photos in poor lighting and odd angles, but the app still stayed nearly flawless. No, it doesn’t have everything - I managed to stump it on a book about Danish Grammar - but it will do just fine for any trip to a retail store.

SnapTell Explorer For iPhone - Tested

Educating Silicon has published an interesting review of Snaptell Explorer for the iPhone

Snipped from the post:

SnapTell just released an iPhone client for their visual search engine. A little sleuthing reveals that the index contains 2.5 million items - apparently most books, DVDs, CDs and game covers.  If the recognition rate is as high as it should be, that’s a pretty impressive achievement. In principle the service was already available via email/mms. In practice, an iPhone client changes the experience completely. Image search becomes the fastest way to get information about anything around you.

In a follow-up review of the app, Educating Silicon noted:

Almost all of books and CDs I had lying around were correctly recognised, despite being pretty obscure titles. With 2.5 million objects in their index, SnapTell can recognise just about any book, CD, DVD or game. Once the title is recognised, you get back a result page like this with a brief review and the option to buy it on Amazon, or search Google, Yahoo or Wikipedia. For music, there is a link to iTunes.

I spent a while “teasing”  the search engine with badly taken photos, and the recognition is very robust. It has no problems with blur, rotation, oblique views, background clutter or partial occlusion of the object.

SnapTell And Us Weekly

SnapTell is in glitzy company this week. Us Weekly, a celebrity and entertainment news magazine, has used SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform to mobilize select ads in its current issue.

Readers use their camera phones to Snap any of the interactive ads in the issue, Send the image to [email protected], will Get a chance to win a trip to attend an Us Weekly celebrity luncheon. Each Snap.Send.Get-enabled ad also offers readers free goodies -- including exclusive ringtones, and chances to win holiday gift baskets and gift certificates from leading retailers.

To find out more about SnapTell’s mobile marketing platform, and how it enables brand owners, marketers and publishers to easily mobilize existing advertising collateral, please email us and/or visit our website.

The Tao Of The GET -- Mobile Marketing Insight From SnapTell

Here at SnapTell we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about what we call the GET -- the content that a brand offers to consumers as part of an interactive image-recognition based marketing campaign. Here’s what we’ve learned about the type of content that tends to spark a consumer’s interest, inspiring them to reach out to an advertiser and initiate a conversation.

The GET Has To Be Good
This seems painfully obvious, but it’s sometimes overlooked: if the GET isn’t appealing consumers won’t bother to connect. Conversely if the GET is interesting, amusing or unique, consumers will not only engage they’ll also likely share the GET with others and become evangelists for the brand.

Design The GET For The Lowest Common Denominator
There’s nothing more frustrating to an interested consumer than a GET that they can’t get. Tailor GETs to the broadest possible audience by making SMS, available on over 98% of the world’s phones, a standard initial response. While mobile delivery of video content is clearly the future it is not yet accessible to all users on all networks on all phones, so resist the temptation to offer video as the only GET option.

Offer Multiple Engagement Options In The GET
Targeting the GET to the lowest common denominator does not mean offering boring text-only content. For example The Weinstein Company’s recent full length feature film release of Morgan Spurlock’s “Where in the World is Osama Bin Linden?” asked consumers to snap a picture of the movie poster at the theater, in local newspaper print ads or from one of the thousands of flyers distributed in five major cities. Consumers then received multiple GET options including a simple short text synopsis of the movie with links to view the theater preview of the release, links to Yahoo movie reviews, and geo-specific content for local movie theater times with the option to purchase tickets via Fandango. In addition, every consumer who participated in the campaign was instantly entered into a sweepstakes in the local market. Over 40% of consumers who snapped a picture of the movie poster drilled multiple layers down to seek out more information about the content and the movie -- far better than the average .02% click through rates achieved by online banner ads.