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I’m firmly in the camp that prefers to read books on paper as opposed to an electronic tablet, but I have to hand it to Amazon for knowing how to pull together the pieces that could make its Kindle eReader product an eventual winner.
The Seattle-based company has acquired a Silicon Valley startup called SnapTell for an undisclosed amount. SnapTell, of Palo Alto, makes a popular application for the iPhone which allows users to take a picture of the cover of a book, a DVD, or some other product they’d like to buy, and the service connects the user to an online store where they can purchase the product.
The service allows the user to have a hard-copy version of the book delivered to their home, but you can see where this would eventually lead. See a book you’d like to read in a store, snap a picture, and later have it delivered electronically to your Kindle.
The SnapTell acquisition comes on top of a move Amazon made in April to acquire a Company called Lexcycle. Lexcycle offers an application called Stanza that allows people to read books on the iPhone – again, give me a paperback for the subway ride any day. But once again, Amazon appears to be filling in all the pieces that will solidify its position as a leader in the eReader market as it matures.
I hadn’t heard of SnapTell prior to the Amazon purchase, but apparently it’s one of the more popular iPhone apps and is now available as an app for the Google Android mobile platform. A blog on the company’s Web site, addressed from the SnapTell Team, offers the following take on the purchase:
“SnapTell has been a leader in visual product search technology and our solutions have been used to deliver reviews, prices and information for millions of visual search queries. It has been tremendously gratifying to see the SnapTell solution become one of the most downloaded iPhone and Android applications. We are even featured in an iPhone TV commercial! Throughout this period we have carefully listened to our users and added innovative features to provide a great visual shopping experience. One of the most heard requests was how we could integrate better with Amazon’s fabulous shopping experience … We should be able to do so pretty well now.”
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