Amazon Mobile for iPhone

Official Amazon iPhone app, available now as a free download from the App Store. In addition to shopping, it has an interesting “Remembers” feature: snap a picture with your iPhone, and it gets saved to your Amazon account. Plus, Amazon sends the image to a team of humans to identify what it is and offer links to similar items for sale at Amazon. (I presume it’s powered by Mechanical Turk.) And, yes, it seems safe to presume this is why Amazon rejected Mazo.

Weird web-design note: Nearly the entire web page, including text, is made of JPEG images. I guess that’s one way to make pages that display properly in IE.

Update: Via Andy Baio, proof that it’s Turk-powered. Also worth mentioning SnapTell, an app Andy showed me a few weeks ago that does the image-recognition trick for any book, game, or DVD.

★ Wednesday, 3 December 2008