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 long 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.
But while SnapTell seems to have the technology perfected, the app itself still needs a little work. Once you’ve located a product there is no rating or description offered - instead you’re directed to the appropriate links on stores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble (it would be nice if some basic rating information was pulled into the app). There’s also currently no way to quickly view a product’s price across multiple online stores, though this will be included in the next release which is expected in the next few weeks. The UI could also use some more polish - buttons are oddly placed, and the app doesn’t look nearly as slick as it should.
SnapTell works best on Wi-Fi and 3G, but also supports Edge (it takes around 10-15 seconds to upload the image on the slower network, versus a moment or two). The application will also be coming to the Android soon, and will feature both the image recognition seen on the iPhone version as well as barcode lookup (which is popular on Android but very difficult to pull off on the iPhone). The app was developed by SnapTell, a company that primarily focuses on image-recognition based marketing, and is making use of the company’s 5 million+ product database.
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Maybe you’re a fan of Google’s Grand Central phone controller. Maybe you also happen to be a Mac addict. So how do you match those two loves into one? Vocito, that’s how.
Savvy to your Mac OS X desktop and things like Address Book, Automator, and the third-party engineered QuickSilver, Vocito manages your management of the multiple phone numbers in your life within slick fashion. In a manner of speaking, it makes easier a process that’s already been quite easy. Way easier, you might say, even if its job is technically more complex.
You could of course use Vocito much the same way you would the browser-based application - albeit doing so within a more Mac-like enclosure. Nothing stops you from heading straight down the usual road.
Open Source Power to the Nth Degree
But power users in the Mac realm might consider that a sheepish use of code. Address Book integration is convenient enough, yes. Yet Vocito’s support for Automator and AppleScript actions, as well as Quicksilver commands, takes things to another level. Really, if you wish, you can manipulate the application without drawing your hands away from your keyboard.
For the most part, Vocito lives a pretty non-ostentatious life on your computer. So long as you can tolerate the presence of a favicon-sized menu bar button sitting astride your clock, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and audio control features, it’ll be at the ready while keeping largely out of the way.
And that’s presumably how many Grand Central users choose to operate the service, making Vocito an ideal candidate for extending your virtual phone switchboard to your Mac desktop. Wonderfully enough, the download is Tiger- and Leopard-compatible with both Intel and PowerPC support. It’s also entirely open source.
Limited GC Beta Access Puts a Cap on Vocito’s Debut
The only immediate downside is that Google is holding Grand Central under a limited beta restriction, disallowing any immediate sign-ups, which I imagine a good number of folks interested in Vocito will be looking for. A forum has been established for people to voice their thoughts and concerns.
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Real estate search site Trulia announced Wednesday that it has inked a deal with 1020 Placecast, an advertising company that uses location-based information to target audiences, that will see the site's advertising become location-specific.
Once a user inputs a location they want to learn more about on Trulia, Placecast will access that data and apply it as a key component along with common demographic data points like psychographic information to provide more targeted ads.
"Once we know the place a user is interested in, we can derive a lot of useful insights about what kind of consumer they are, and then serve them a very targeted ad," Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast said in a statement.
In order to deliver that ad, Placecast works with publishers in categories such as travel, events, real estate, and weather to offer advertisements that not only try to appeal to visitors, but make their location a key factor in targeting them.
The partnership with Placecast is extremely important for Trulia. The company is naturally affected by the downturn in the real estate market and it relies on home ownership for success. Realizing that, Trulia executives needed to act and increase revenue as quickly as possible during these suspect times and they evidently believe Placecast is their best bet.
Now, while I find the behavior of public invite-requesting curious, I understand it.
I also think there’s another side to this equation that I’d like to point out, being one of the fortunate early adopters who happens to get invited to a lot of early alphas and betas… and that’s understanding the relationship between the creator of the beta and the testers. Or, to put it another way, requesting an invite to a service for one’s own benefit is one thing; understanding that an invite is a privilege given in exchange for feedback and suggestions provided is another. And the secret to getting early access to beta programs is, perhaps obviously, to be a good beta tester.
There are any number of ways to demonstrate that you’re worthy of an invite to an invite-only alpha or beta program. One problem is that a lot of beta feedback is submitted privately, outside of public forums. Whenever I can, I attempt to use more publicforums, both for my own recollection, but also for the benefit or other testers, developers and later users.
In other cases, I’ll use Flickr or Twitter, leading to interesting phenomena, similar to what Fred describes.
It just so happens that I screenshotted an element of the new interface, uploaded it to Flickr and titled the photo “Spotify Invites“. That photo is now the second result for that phrase on Google and people have noticed, quickly exhausting my supply of invites.
The problem with this scenario, and with Fred’s, is that many folks seem eager to get access solely for their own benefit, without thought to the quid pro quo that makes beta programs successful (and ultimately benefit both the developer and subsequent users!). And I think it’s worth it to point out that beta programs aren’t just freebie give-aways: the gate is there for a reason!
I wrote this post in 2005, back when Gmail was an invite-only service (!!) and I was thinking about the relationships we were attempting to cultivate with the Flock alpha tester program:
So what of alltheseinvite-only (or formally invite-only) services where you have to know someone on the inside to get a golden ticket? Does it artificially increase desire? Does it help services grow organically and cut down on trolls and spam, creating more value for invitees? Does it create more investment from the user community and perhaps establish even minor connections between invitor and invitee? Or does it create a false hierarchy around an inner circle of well-connected geeks?
Who knows?
What I do know is that it’s a curious trend and happening rather profusely across the web. Good or bad? I can’t quite say — except that in the case of Flock, we’re using the invite system to start out slowly on purpose. We want to not only be able to scale up organically, but we also want to cultivate relationships with our brave early adopters so that we can build the best experience possible over time. And to that end — we want to make sure that when we do launch publicly, we’ve hammered out all the glaring issues — as well as minor ones — so that sum total Flock makes you more productive, more explorative, and more voraciously social on the web. So for now, Flock will remain available to few kindred souls with enough courage to shove through our bugs and dodge the sharp edges. In the meantime, do add yourself to our invite lottery so that your name will be there when the next round of invites go out.
Not much has changed in terms of the structure of invite-only betas (even though the tools for managing them have improved), but I think something of the intimacy and purpose of these programs have been missed as more of the mainstream have gotten used to handing out just their email address for access to such initiatives.
As Fred points out that there’s value in building up social capital so that you can help stoke interest in new projects and draw the interest of potentially valuable contributors and testers, but it’s just as important to highlight the value of diligent and hard-working testers who have an interest in improving products and becoming partners in the potential success of such projects. I think there’s the potential for mutually reinforcing and ongoing relationships in the execution of a productive beta program, and that those longer-term relationships should not be overlooked.
. . .
To that end, I’m looking for some highly motivated and qualified testers for LittleSnapper, Real Mac Software’s new webpage screenshot utility. Be one of the first ten to leave a comment with your proper email address and a description of how you approach beta testing and I’ll send you info on where you can sign up. As I’m eager to see LittleSnapper mature, I won’t settle for just anyone — prove to me that you’d add value to the alpha tester program!
Mobispine, the mobile services developer already responsible for introducing a $1.99 self-titled iPhone application for RSS news junkies, has debuted a white-label option for wireless carriers to deliver to subscribers seeking classic MMS utility from their devices. Just short of an extension of the iPhone’s standard SMS software, Mobispine’s offering is something that just might fly.
Media Sharing Apps Aplenty, But Still No Real MMS
As iPhone users have known since the App Store’s launch, there are already many ways to send MMS (multimedia messaging service) data from the device to Web users. The Mail and optional Facebook applications are just two avenues. And a pseudo MMS service for iPhone, called Flutter, gets iPhone users into mobile-to-mobile.
But white-label - and ultimately carrier-branded - MMS software is something Mobispine seems to be breaking new ground with. True MMS software just does not inhabit the iPhone world. And if any operators are to convince Apple of the efficacy of bringing such an option to the platform, it is the selection of wireless carriers around the world who are partnered with Apple that will make it happen.
Is the White-Label Angle the Golden Ticket?
Nothing’s certain, mind you. Though Mobispine says it is “confident that operators will find the service easy to use and profitable with an opportunity to expand messaging usage, improve subscriber retention and increase revenue,” adoption is something that has no guarantee. But things in the world of SMS and MMS are very much about uniformity. Mobispine appears to offer the latter option.
We’re eager to see who bites first.
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Maybe you’re a fan of Google’s 
