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The “what the heck is this” service

Problem: Often, one finds onesself looking at things and wondering the exact details of what they are. Dogs, cars, mountains, landmarks, trees, flowers, presidents, patio furniture. All sorts of stuff.

Solution: Take a picture with your phone and email it to our whattheheckisthis.com service. Within 20 minutes you’ll get a message saying what the thing is.

I haven’t quite worked out the details of how this will work. Perhaps there will be a web site where anyone can identify the incoming nonsense and get paid for it. I’ve also got no idea how it would make money. Perhaps you pay once we have determined that we definitely can identify your thing? Well, a few things to sort out. But this is the general idea.

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  1. Thib
    August 2nd, 2010 at 15:09 | #1

    This sounds like Shazam for life. For monetization, you can look at how they make money (by putting links to advertisers who sell what you asked to identify). As far as technical details… Whew!

  2. Bob Carpark
    August 2nd, 2010 at 17:04 | #2

    The oldest answer in the book: outsource to a callcentre in India. They can wikipedia or google whatever it is. Return details on the identified object surrounded by links to various google ads.
    If the call centre can’t identify it then so oh dear how sad – it’s not as though the customer spent any money for the service.
    The other option is like the website you suggest. Joe public can identify the tricky ones (somehow within 20 minutes though… Could you make it an hour?) I’m not sure what’s in it for Joe public though… maybe offer them eg a $1 itunes credit or something similar.

  3. chris
    August 3rd, 2010 at 00:51 | #3

    A refinement of this occurred to me. Perhaps it could ask that you select a category (“dogs”, “landmarks” etc) and then the web site would post to a Twitter account per category. Followers could try and identify the pictures in idle moments. Web site tracks good identifications and keeps score for Twitter users?

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