Send us a picture and we'll tell you what's in your head (no MRI necessary)

I wrote here a while back about J-Magic’s popular kaocheki service, which lets users send in a phone cam shot of their face, runs it through server-side visual recognition/image comparison software and then tells them which celebrities they resemble most. This has enabled J-Magic to collect tens of millions of Japanese mobile email adresses in just a few months, which they now happily use as a database for mobile email marketing. Furthermore, they’ve got the users’ faces tied to those email addresses as well, which opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for J-Magic enabling mobile social networking applications and all sorts of other stuff in the future (as well as familiarizing people with mobile visual search in general, an area that J-Magic is active in with several products). Now a company called K&A Partners (which I had never heard of until now) put a different twist to this concept with their Nounai Cheki (“Inside-the-brain check”) service: “Send us a picture of yourself, and we’ll display an overlay of Japanese characters describing your personality, showing what’s going on inside your head.” Nounai Cheki: What your face says about what’s going on inside your head Now, while I very much doubt the empirical validity of the algorithms behind this, it’s definitely a good laugh. My result was about 80% love and 20% money, which, if you ask me, is an interesting manifestation of the Pareto Principle, more colloquially known as the 80/20 rule. When you send in your picture to get a clearer idea of what is really going on inside your mind, something I predicted would happen soon on J-Magic’s kaocheki takes place: a profile page for a mobile social networking service called “Mobisura” is created (Japanese English for “Mobile Slide”). Also, they have included a virtual points/currency system along the lines of what I called a “Point Affiliate System” in this post on ultra-popular mobile free games/social networking service mobagetown and some of its newer competitors: When signing up for Mobisura, members get 30 points, which enable them to send in three shots of themselves or friends - and in order to get more points (you guessed it) they need to recruit new members for the service, click on mobile ads, subscribe to or purchase mobile content downloads from partner sites. As I have noted before, I am not very sure about the sustainability of services like these, but it’s surely a clever way to collect mobile email addresses for marketing purposes, especially in a market like Japan where people are as crazy about fortune-telling-type services as they are about mobile phones. Via K-tai Watch

Posted by:Billich | Entry Date: 2007年10月 9日 19:04