TinEye Mobile

Last night I had the pleasure of stopping by the offices at Idée Inc. here in Toronto to check out a preview of their new iPhone app in development, TinEye Mobile. As Leila explains it so nicely over on the Idée blog, the whole idea is to take the power of their killer image search engine, TinEye, and make it available on your smartphone.

The whole idea is if you’re at the record store, book store, and see something that you’re into (but you’d rather give it a price check first or purchase it immediately from your retailer of choice online), you just snap a photo of the product, and TinEye will connect you with the iTunes Store or other online marketplace to immediately sample or buy the product.

Overall the app really performed well, recognizing just about any album cover I snapped and immediately pushing me out to the iTunes Store. It’s the kind of technology that when you put it in a non-techy person’s hand and ask them to try it, they think there’s some kind of magic happening.

One intriguing part of this app is that it could totally subvert brick & mortar retailers, while at the same time if they take full advantage of it, really propel their business. Indigo/Chapters would really benefit by getting in touch with the Idée folks sooner rather than later, and make their inventory a checkout point for users snapping photos of books all over the world.

There’s been a lot of buzz around using QR codes, barcodes, and otherwise to do comparison shopping in-store on mobiles lately, but I think this is where the future is. Companies shouldn’t have to build additional complexity into their packaging, and users shouldn’t have to hunt for these identifiers on the packaging in order for phones to be able to identify them.

It’s apps like this that are going to make the number of new mobile application platforms really interesting to use and work with.