Snaptell Explorer retrives product listings from the iPhone's camera

I wanted to make an app to scan barcodes and do price comparison but the problem is it would most likely take a few tries to get a pic that's suffecient. I "could" use the live camera feed and the app would work awesome, but apple wouldn't allow it in the store. So it's a loose loose situation for everyone.

I hate in when people seem to have nothing better to do than correct spelling in blogs.

If perfect spelling is your thing go read the dictionary and quit annoying the bejesus out of people who read the blog for it's content, not to run a spell check on it.

Peace.

tineye.com

I just did a video review of this application, wow it rules!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR4cdQRrk1s

I'm surprised you guys haven't figured out how they do the recognition. Have you heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk? They just pay people to do it :)

From the tests I've seen, and the ones I've run myself, it will be pretty difficult to use the iPhone camera stock to read barcodes - it just doesn't have the macro capability to focus on the UPC. The Delicious Library code is pretty amazing, though and might be enough to overcome the issues.

For those who are interested: One possible way to check images is to shrink them to a standard size (like 150x150px) and then convert to greyscale. Though they still have to figure out how to discard the surroundings or deal with the fact that your thumb is visible. Still, it's a neat trick, and yes, I wish someone would also make a system like Delicious Library's barcode-scanning system. I'd pay for the app, and maybe they could partner with Griffin to give users a discount on the Clarifi macro lens/case?
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/09/17/new-iphone-products-from-griffin-technology/
http://flickr.com/search/?q=clarifi&w=all

the g1 has something like this, where u take a photo of the actual UPC and then it takes u to the amazon online store or a froogle page and compares prices.
good to see this make it to the app store finally. i've had plenty of g1 friends asking if we had an app like this...
all i said was, not YET.

In related news, "fbFund Review: Pongr": http://www.allfacebook.com/2008/11/pong/

It seems they have an iPhone app too, from the video.

Works with barcode OCR.

Very cool idea. Definitely need the price comparison... cuz typing into google would be faster no?

As for speed - I'd guess the time difference (edge, wifi, 3g) is uploading the photo, or downloading the results, not searching their database. Their speed doesn't change.