Here's a free iPhone application that's sure to get some use from me this holiday season. It's called SnapTell Explorer because you snap a product's picture and it tells you what the product costs at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Using the mediocre camera on my iPhone, I snapped a picture of "The Audacity of Hope" that I'm reading now. Sure enough, even with a marginal picture, SnapTell correctly identified the book and provided me relevant links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Wikipedia, as well as Google and Yahoo!.

The technology behind the application is geared to work through the inevitable blur that's common with quick snaps from a cameraphone:

"Our technology works effectively on photos taken with almost all
camera phones in the world wide market, including phones on the lower
end of the market that have VGA cameras or relatively low resolution
(640×480) cameras. Also, our matching server can handle photos taken in
real life conditions that have a lot of issues including lighting
artifacts, focus blur, motion blur, perspective distortion and
incomplete overlap with the database image. Our technology works in a
wide variety of real life scenarios including those of consumers taking
photos of magazine print ads, outdoor billboards, posters, product
packaging, branded cans, bottles and logos.

Another
novel aspect of our technology is a patent pending innovation to
automatically extract text embedded in camera phone images with
unprecedented accuracy and use the extracted text to drive search. Text
extraction is useful in scenarios in which the target image is not
already registered in the database"

The application's database is currently limited to CDs, DVDs, video games and books, but according to TechCrunch, it's pretty well stocked in those areas. There's definitely room for improvement since SnapTell doesn't provide a one-screen view of prices, like a comparable early Android application that uses barcodes to identify products. Speaking of Android, the company plans to offer SnapTell for that platform as well.