SnapTell Blog

SnapTell acquired by Amazon.com subsidiary A9.com

We are very excited to announce that SnapTell has been acquired by A9.com, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.! We look forward to integrating our solutions and technology into the Amazon experience to make shopping even more fun and easy for customers.

SnapTell has been a leader in visual product search technology and our solutions have been used to deliver reviews, prices and information for millions of visual search queries. It has been tremendously gratifying to see the SnapTell solution become one of the most downloaded iPhone and Android applications. We are even featured in an iPhone TV commercial! Throughout this period we have carefully listened to our users and added innovative features to provide a great visual shopping experience.  One of the most heard requests was how we could integrate better with Amazon’s fabulous shopping experience … We should be able to do so pretty well now. ☺

Customers can continue to browse, review, and purchase products through SnapTell’s expanding recognition categories.  And of course, we will still continue to improve the app based on customer feedback. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our users.

We are excited to join forces with a company that has innovated on behalf of customers for over a decade and is a pioneer in online shopping. Like Amazon, we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead for visual shopping and we are thrilled to join A9.com at this exciting time.

As always, we encourage people to ask questions or provide feedback through our blog at http://snaptell.typepad.com or directly to us at info at snaptell dot net

Best,
The SnapTell Team

A Lucky Charm from Almay!

Almay Pure Blends is running a "Mobile Treasure Hunt"  using Snap.Send.Get from SnapTell: Snap a picture of an Almay Pure Brands product on-shelf, Send the picture to 707070, and Get a charm from Lucky magazine when you provide your mailing address. Simple!

alli, Wynonna and SnapTell

"Hey, it's Wynonna. I'm putting on a private concert in Nashville sponsored by alli. Enter for a chance to attend with a guest at mystorymyalli.com"

alli, the FDA approved, over-the-counter weight loss pill is extending their concert promotion with Wynonna Judd to a mobile setting using Snap.Send.Get from SnapTell. Camera-phone owning consumers are invited to take a picture of the alli logo, or Wynonna's tour bus to enter for a chance to attend a private concert with Wynnona!

 

Martha Stewart Weddings: Every Bride Needs "Something NEW!"

The Winter 2009 issue of Martha Stewart Weddings became the first bridal magazine to use SnapTell technology with interactive advertisements.  From cover to cover the issue is full of interactive ads that invite you to Snap.Send.Get and get tips, special offers, downloads and store locators. Even ringtones and wallpapers fit for a bride!

Every bride needs "something old, something new." Martha Stewart Weddings has something just for you.

  

The magazine features more than 200 advertisers giving tips from the Martha Stewart Weddings archives, special offers, store locators, ringtones and wallpapers.  Twenty five lucky readers will also have the chance to win copies of "Martha Stewart's Wedding Cakes", a delicios showcase of inspiring cakes.

Maserati: Snap.Send.Get to conduct your own research!

The December issue of GQ features Snap.Send.Get for Maserati, the manufacturer of luxury sports cars of unmatched design. The ad talks about a "recent scientific study discovered about women's response to the sound of a Maserati engine" and invites the readers to find out from themselves!

To conduct some research of your own:
SNAP a camera phone picture of the Maserati ad in this issue of GQ.
SEND it to 707070* from your mobile phone.
GET the Maserati engine ringtone on your phone

 

The LA Times blog has an interesting writeup about this study from Maserati:
Vroom vroom ... Is that your phone ringing, or your Maserati?

To hear the sound of a rip-snorting Mazzer engine, you can simply text the word "Maserati" to 707070 and you can download a free ringtone, which you can use in bars, grocery stores, Starbucks ... anywhere your animal magnetism could use a boost.

NY Times: "The fanciest iPhone app I tried was SnapTell"

The Gadgetwise blog of The New York Times has a great piece on the shopping apps available for today's generation of smartphones. The article, Big Shopping App Shootout: iPhone vs. G1 examines the well known issues with bar-codes as well:

I didn’t think the bar code readers would recognize tags at a chain store, because I expected them to have their own proprietary bar codes. But I was surprised when national brands of clothing at a department store didn’t register either.

SnapTell for the iPhone earned kudos from the author Roy Furchgott for its accuracy and ease of use:

The fanciest iPhone app I tried was SnapTell, which doesn’t use a bar code, but makes a search from a photo you take of an item. SnapTell correctly recognized the CD from the cover, and returned nine online prices, starting at $10.65. It should have given results for local stores but didn’t, so I tried a more common item, the Doris Kearns Goodwin book “Team of Rivals.” SnapTell not only found it online, but also at two stores less than 10 miles away — and at a discount.

AdWeek's Top Media & Marketing Innovations of 2008

AdWeek's Tony Case, Editor, Special Reports makes some very insightful observations in their piece calling out the Top Media & Marketing Innovations of 2008:

In the midst of the worst economic morass most of us can recall, these are some of the year's best innovations in media and marketing -- some that look to have lasting influence, others that could even prove to be real game changers for digital media, in-store marketers, the TV networks, even architects of political campaigns.

Lucia Moses  in the same write up had this to say about SnapTell:

Oh, Snap! Magazine Ads Get Interactive
With the print ad business in freefall, a few publishers aim to make their ad pages a more engaging, truly interactive experience, taking advantage of the exploding popularity of Web-enabled mobile devices. Technology from Palo Alto, Calif.-based mobile marketing company SnapTell enables brands to send messages to readers who shoot photos of magazine ads with their mobile phones. Rodale's Men's Health, Wenner Media's Rolling Stone and Disney's ESPN The Magazine are some of the titles to have adopted the technology this year

This has been a great year for innovation in Media & Marketing. We at SnapTell believe that 2009 is positioned to be an even more exciting year in which advertisers will demand analyses and metrics from their print and out-of-home campaigns.

SnapTell Explorer for the iPhone: Rated #2 in Lifestyle Category

SnapTell's Explorer is now at the number 2 spot in the Lifestyle category. The new version of the app with an improved UI and support for local prices has been greeted  with great enthusiasm among the IPhone user community!

SnapTell Explorer lets you take a picture of any CD, DVD, book, or video game and get back reviews, prices from multiple online and local sources within seconds.

We are releasing the Explorer for the Android platform very soon. Our app for the Android platform is capable of recognizing ordinary barcodes, as well as the cool image-recognition feature that works even when there are no barcodes!

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 popsci@snaptell.com (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.