Hands on with iPhone and Android visual search app kooaba

There’s something a little bit scary about what kooaba can do. Labelled – rightly as far as I can ascertain – Shazam for images – kooaba is a very neat app that enables you to categorise (and build) your CD, DVD and game collection via the power of computer vision and some database trawling.

The process is simple. Merely open the free app (once you’ve downloaded it from the App Store (link) or Android Market) and then use your device’s camera to take a picture of the cover of a CD, DVD or computer game, or even a movie poster. It will then whirl away and try to recognise what the media is.

I was using the Android version on my G1 and over Wi-Fi, the recognition part took less than 10 seconds. Of course, sometimes, it won’t be able to work out what the content is. This can be because of lighting conditions or because you haven’t taken a very good photo. However, when experimenting with odd crops and orientations, I thought kooaba worked pretty well. And the database picked up some fairly obscure albums too.

If it doesn’t recognise the photo, it will save the image and label it ‘Unrecognized’ and you can try again or move on. If there is a match however, then kooaba will open up the device’s web browser and show a list of relevant options, such as Amazon or eBay shopping links, Tickets (for music), YouTube, flickr and taptu media links, Facebook, Google search and the option to send a SMS. Each match is saved on your phone.

So far so neat, you may be thinking.

Where kooaba gets more interesting however is when you register for the website. Then you can enter your login details on your device and your searches will be stored online. Here you can play around with them some more. Current options are a tickbox to say you own that item, plus sharing and rating them on Facebook, Digging them and/or Twittering.

Of course, kooaba is still something of a work-in-process as it doesn’t really have a unique selling point yet. To be honest, I can’t see it building a sustainable business just on advertising and affiliate links so it will need to add something else to the mix; whether more community aspects and/or some sort of premium services.

In terms of other things to recognise, it plans to add books, newspapers, magazines and historical buildings to its database over time. The company’s also looking at mobile advertising where physical objects can be used as hyperlinks.

Still, at the moment, it certainly is a neat technology, even if you’re just using it to remind yourself about things you want to buy at a later date.

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