Crowdsourcing used to identify products in photos

CrowdSend encourages users to tag photos with information about the products depicted.

One problem with online images of products is that they can easily be divorced from their context, especially when consumers share them without linking back to their original source. Aiming to reveal the identity of unknown items, CrowdSend encourages users to tag photos with information about the products depicted within them. Web users who stumble across an item they like, but don’t know where to buy it, can set up an account with CrowdSend, upload the photo and ask the community to identify it. Others can then suggest what it might be and the highest rated answer is attached as a tag, along with any other relevant information such as brand, model and where it can be bought. Members can gain rewards in the form of discounts for correctly identifying items and can also interact with the products by liking them, placing them on their wishlist or letting others know if they own it. This information can then be relayed to the companies, enabling them to monitor consumer engagement with their products online, as well as ensuring interested parties are directed towards the right places to make a purchase. The Crowdsend platform also allows tags to be discretely embedded onto third party websites, appearing when the mouse hovers over an image. Just as VideoDeals aimed to make items in videos clickable, CrowdSend hopes to harness the power of the internet to turn static images into more useful, interactive webpage elements. Although currently in private beta, the site already has more than 25 million products tagged. Is this the future for visual media online? Spotted by: Murray Orange