Want visual memory? Try kooaba Déjà Vu
Source: kooaba
Do you use your iPhone to remember things by taking pictures of stuff? For instance wine labels, furniture, book covers, newspaper articles, food, recipes, receipts …? Congratulations: you use your iPhone as a visual memory! This reduces information overflow and keeps your brain free for more important stuff.
You understand how efficient it is just to snap a picture in order to remember something visually.
But you may have noticed that your camera roll quickly turns into a mess. Everything is mixed (holiday pictures between wine labels, and newspaper articles). Furthermore, these collections can become increasingly large, holding thousands or even tens of thousands of pictures. Think of how many photos you took with your iPhone in the last 3 years and extrapolate that to the next 30 years. Overwhelming.
kooaba Déjà Vu is your visual memory
Just as you, we needed a better solution. We imagined a mobile camera app, which was specifically tailored for serving you as a visual memory. Which brings order to the chaos in your camera roll. Which lets you easily search and organize your visual memos and even creates a safe backup for you if your iPhone falls in a lake 
. This is exactly what our new product kooaba Déjà Vu aspires to do for you.
How does this work? Watch the video below for a short intro.
Convinced? vote here). Alternatively, you can also register for just the web account.
Not convinced yet? To sum it up, the features of Déjà Vu as of today are
- A better mobile camera. Déjà Vu is specifically designed to snap photos of things you want to remember on the go. It allows for fast picture taking and easy navigation through your visual memos.
- Image recognition integrated. Image recognition technology identifies many things (Books, DVDs, Music, Wine Labels, etc.) in your visual memos and automatically categorizes and labels them. This saves you time and effort.
- Cloud syncing. All visual memos are synchronized with your personal account in the cloud. There, they are stored safely forever and you can always access them from any device.
- Effortless organization. The intuitive interface makes it easy to label, tag, and organize your visual memos. On the web and on your mobile device. Of course, all of your changes are synced automatically.
- Easy search and find. You can search your visual memos by keywords and tags, browse them by category and view them on a map. These features are available both on your mobile device and on your desktop.
- Grows with you. Our free plan includes 30 visual memos per month and access to all features. You can upgrade to unlimited usage for only $19.99 per year.
Ok, we think you should really Paperboy and Vivino. The goal of these apps is to respond to user needs where image recognition is key element to solving the problem. This is driven by the notion that just offering visual general visual search just doesn’t cut it.
Throughout the last five years, we had the chance to talk to many of our users and collect their feedback. One thing that constantly came up was the fact that many of them use our apps to remember things, rather than to interact with them. For example, when people used kooaba Visual Search to take a picture of a book, it was often to remember it for buying it later, rather than having instant access to reviews or shopping options. The same holds for kooaba Paperboy, where from the three benefits (Share, Explore, Remember), the one that’s consistently reported as the most popular by users is Remember.
In fact, even when talking to people that do not use any kooaba app about how they use their mobile camera, many of them mention the fact that they use it as their visual memory. Why is that? Having a camera integrated in your mobile phone has changed the way we take pictures. First, of course, the pictures are digital, so taking one doesn’t cost you a dime. Second, you have your mobile phone always with you. Third, snapping a picture is probably the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to remember anything.
These are the reasons that led us to create kooaba Déjà Vu.
What’s next?
Of course, we have many more useful features for Déjà Vu in mind than the ones we offer in this first release – some of them will launch as early as this month. Also, the use-case of a visual memory in general opens a whole bunch of new possibilities for image recognition. This is still our core competence and we do not plan on retiring from innovating here.
Speaking of which: what will happen to our visual search apps? We will continue focussing on covering verticals for visual search with our platform, and Paperboy as our main product. kooaba Visual search will be discontinued in the midterm (we will offer tools for migrating your data to Déjà Vu).
We are still only at the beginning of what’s possible for image recognition. Dealing with digital pictures in a smarter way will pose a growing challenge and will lead to lots of new applications. For the time being, we are really excited about Déjà Vu and eager to hear what you think about it. Try it. And let us know your ideas and thoughts here.
Herbert and Till,
and the whole kooaba team.
P.S. Shhhh, did you 