POINT, CLICK, LINK!

Recognizd - cool name, what's the big idea?

Recognizd is the world's first Twitter-based image recognition platform. It's the new killer app for marketers, advertisers and brands. It's the missing link between printed media and everything mobile and digital.

Image recognition + Twitter - sounds cool but what it can do for me?

Let's assume you already know what Twitter is ;-)  So we'll focus on image recognition. 

Image recognition uses the power of the cameraphone to make any image - on a poster, in press, on the side of a bus - linkable, clickable, and actionable.

It's quick, simple and cheap to set up - a user just has to snap and send a pic of a recognizable image to get back links to relevant digital content. 

It's like QR codes, but without the codes. Or Shazam for pictures - get it?

OK - but how does it actually work, in detail?

Recognizable images are stored in a comparison database. When someone snaps a copy of an image, the system compares this snap with the stored originals. If it finds a match, the system sends a response.*

This could be a basic greeting - or a link to digital content, like a website, a Facebook page, or a YouTube trailer. Or a voucher, a competition entry or a download. Whatever you think, you can probably link.

*If it doesn't find a match, it sends a nice, polite error message.

How does it recognize the images?

Is uses image processing technology developed for robotics and space programmes. Which is way cooler than barcodes, which were originally developed for scanning groceries.

There's no OCR, no NFC, no RFID - it's purely visual. It's also smart enough to cope with imperfect pics - so camera shake, reflections, shadows or partially obscured pics won't mess up recognition.

Is this just sci-if theory or is image recognition for real?

Image recognition currently powers comparison shopping and e-commerce apps, review sites and ad campaigns, for some of the world's biggest brands, recognizing books, CDs, DVDs, movie posters and more.

Recognizd is focusing mainly on print ads and marketing materials - out of home, ambient, press, print, direct mail, point of sale and packaging.

Great, I get image recognition - now what's the Twitter connection?

Until now, to recognize images you needed an app - dear to develop and distribute, and for smartphones only. Or you had to send an MMS (expensive) or an email (free, but clunky for most user groups).

Recognizd leverages the popularity of the fastest-growing, most dynamic social medium. Don't worry about people having the right app - it's Twitter, they have it!  

It's pre-installed on most phones, and free or cheap on most data-plans. 

Users just snap an image, put it in a tweet - something they probably do regularly - and mention @rcgnzd in the tweet. That's it - click, tweet, and they get the link. 

With millions of people worldwide using their phones to snap and share images via Twitter (and Facebook, Instagram, Hipstamatic, Color, Fancy, Path, etc.), this activity is becoming more mainstream every day.

So this is a social media thing, right?

In some ways yes - for starters it uses Twitter as a channel. 

It works by taking and sharing a pic, which is pretty social. If your visual or offer is cool, it could go viral, as people share with their social graph. And one of the key uses is to drive traffic to social sites - snap our ad to like us!

But in other ways, this is just another way to respond to an ad. It's a cool, mobile, social way, but in terms of ease of use, we think it works as well for old fogies as hipster kids.

As it happens I know a lot about Twitter. Why bother with image recognition? Why not just link a response to a regular #hastag or @mention?

Imagine a campaign with several different posters, press ads, brochures and point of sale, containing a variety of products and offers, changing over time. And you want to attach a different response to each ad, product or offer.

You'd need a lot of #hashtags or @usernames, to make this happen. A pain for an advertiser to produce, a bigger pain for the consumer to understand. 

With Recognizd, one @username is all you need, for the whole campaign, forever. Image recognition does the rest. Send the shirt link to the guy who tweets the shirt pic, the shoe link to the gal who tweets the shoe pic, etc.

You could add a response to each pic in an entire shopping catalogue, linked to a buy button, all keyed to a single @username. Image recognition sorts out the red dress from the blue sweater and sends back the right details. 

Customers just snap and tweet to buy...

And more?

You can easily add @Recognizd to campaigns or visuals already published. Just add the image to the database, tell folks how to snap and tweet, and you can send links for your digital content to their phones, right away.

You can make pretty much any 2d image recognizable - paintings, graffiti tags, art photography. It's a cool response mechanism for check-ins, reward schemes, treasure hunts, competition entries and more. 

Because it's linked to a physical image, it's more accurate for geo-location purposes than most GPS or other phone-based systems. You know they're in front of the poster, they've sent you a photo!

OK, I'm sold - how do I get this?

Contact us - just click the link to send us a mail or call +353 (0)87 856 2838.  We'd love to hear from you - questions and feedback more than welcome.