That Killer App

Let's take a stab at a collaborative effort to develop a spec for That Killer App (hereinafter 'TKA').

You know, the one that is going to:

1) be of use to existing collectors, so that they will fund & build & use it;

2) help stamp collecting and/or philately move into the online, real-time, digital space.

While TKA will make OBH (Our Beloved Hobby) more accessible to young people, this ancillary benefif is not part of the specification. (If you do not understand 'why', lemme know, and I will try to help without merely repeating myself.)

I think that TKA needs a readily achievable functionality, not a wish list of everything that an app could possibly do.

It also needs the things that young people look for, eg, a social/sharing aspect.

I suggest Image Recognition.

1) Point your camera at a stamp;

2) Get a list of stamps that might be what you are looking at;

2a) Along with distinguishing criteria (perfs, watermarks, dimensions, colors'n'shades);

2b) Allow interactive reduction of the results with the addition of more information, eg, after the user measured the perfs as HxV;

3) Allow other users to edit that results list, Wiki-style (eg, with a lightly-supervising supervisory team, largely in the background);

4) Allow anyone to grab that image, and add it to 'their' collection (want it, own it, for trade, for sale, individual details);

5) Allow 'posting' to the websites that already do much of this, sans the online, real-time, interactive identification.

Q/ Anybody got a different spec for a different Killer App?

Q/ Anybody got edits & additions to this one?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey


*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

Re: #2...identify it how? Year and country?

Catalogue number?

ikeyPikey...I toyed with this over a year ago...Contacted a couple of companies...HARDER THAN YOU THINK.

I was playing with "face recognition" software in Linux, and I almost gave up..Way too labour intensive...Nice thought though.

How about an app that provides a checklist of items to add to your collection? For example, listing all items included in a specific stamp album and let the user check off what they have and get a list of what they need to complete the collection? One of my biggest challenges is determining what is missing from my collection. Of course, an album doesn't exist for what I am collecting, and I have been digging through various resources to try and come up with a list of items that should be part of a collection.

what would be really helpful, if we have a web site for this forum with links to tons of information to use at our finger tips.

Just like collecting world-wide stamps is an formidable task, identifying a stamp that could come from anywhere is also an enormous challenge. I suspect that the identification process will entail searching a large world-wide data base. To limit the size of the initial database, I suggest you concentrate on one country i.e. USA, BB, Canada, France and not try to include the whole world while bebugging the prototypes.

It does sound like a great app tho!

where is the fun in having a software to ID the stamps ? This is the best part of the hobby

If you are insist on this app..check this out..

http://lignup.com/stamp-search.html

OR

I already did this with Microsoft Excel. There is one spreadsheet for stamps I do have, and one for stamps I don't have, as well as used ones. Why have both? I "always" had the one for the stamps I did have, but I was running out of stamps to buy that were affordable, so I made the second one not in order of Scott number, but in order of relative cost. Both must be updated when one stamp is bought. The penalty for not doing so is much too terrible to imagine.

My US airmail is complete, and my US regular issues and commemoratives are complete from 1923 to 1988. And I have no other area of interest in collecting other than these. So It's starting to get expensive for this fixed income collector.

I'm now replacing cancelled stamps with "barely cancelled" stamps while occasionally blowing a wad on a gem, and buying barely cancelled stamps for empty spaces. Tax refund time will be coming up in a couple of months and I already have picked out two gems (no...no...I want it to be a surprise) that I will be well satisfied with.

Why do I spend so much money on a single stamp? For me it is just the satisfaction (and a feel of victory) for having it. It means that much to me I guess.

Rambling again. Sorry.


-IBFS

To everything else that's been said, add an online, always up-to-date catalog and database with on-the-fly album page creation, that's the ultimate pipe dream. A single, integrated app that can identify stamps, catalog them, add them to inventory and update your want list. And make album pages. All with no more than a few clicks of a mouse. That's all possible with today's existing technology and if there were a billion dollar market for such a thing, it would probably already exist. But the resources to develop all that would likely dwarf the potential income, which I'm sure is a pretty small fraction of a billion. If anything like that were to ever happen, it would almost have to be an open-source, volunteer collaborative effort, because I can't see any company in the hobby today who would be willing to throw the millions of dollars that would take to get off the ground.

Cjd: Identification by catalog number requires licensing royalties to the catalog companies; in a number of SCF threads, folks have reported both disinterest by the wouldbe licensor and very high fees. Public (royalty-free license-free) information would presumably include country, year, 'name', denomination.

wert: I do not know what you tried, but real-time facial recognition software is a commercial reality. Interestingly enough, the most effective algorithms flatten the face, and then measure distance between features. Effective recognition of an already-2D image should be a bit of a snap. Perhaps the software development plan needs to include a neural network training component?

adcaplan: How about this variation? A web-based wiki-type checklist in a structure that is easily/selectively downloadable to your phone? There are existing 'checklist' sites that might be willing to partner with a team interested in porting to an app ...




EasyOne: I see the image recognition algorithm relying on abstract features, so there is no reason to exclude a country; in fact, I would want something for the Japanese guy to do while the Persians are busy.




area66: Don't worry, there'll be errors to correct for a long time to come ;)




No, wert, I was only throwing out an idea to get the discussion moving.




Agreed. But that is an advantage (cheap labor, labor of love) and not a disadvantage. We have numerous examples, principal among them Wikipedia, that shows what an open-source, volunteer collaborative effort can accomplish.

Q/ Would you forego one stamp per year (U$D 100?) to kick-start such a project?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

BINGO TheArtfulHinger...So hit the nail on the head..glad YOU had the incite to recognize why there is NO mainstream APP for such an endeavour.

Robert

The most time consuming but easiest part to collaborate on would be the stamp images. In a fully digital catalog, there would be little reason not to picture every single stamp, not just one of the type. Collectors around the world could scan in their copies of a particular stamp, which could be added to a master database and labeled by catalog number. Anyone wanting to build an app would just need to bounce their app off that database. Yes, I know there could be some issues with image standardization and scanner calibration and whatnot, but I think it would be a workable solution as long as the database is done in a wiki format where other collectors can edit and maybe post better images, etc.

Don't get me wrong, app development along the lines of what's being talked about would still take considerable resources and is still unlikely to happen even with a ready-made image database. But having the images done more or less for free would be a tremendous help and would be a valuable resource for philatelists in its own right.

Great idea. I am afraid it will be too expensive to develop and too small potential market (too few potential users). In any case, if you do decide to move forward with this project, count me in for support and stress testing. I can also provide backend support web/php/sql

"Identification by catalog number requires licensing royalties to the catalog companies"

Actually a catalog number would not really be needed, as long as the exact stamp type and description information is listed then the specific date of issue should be enough for an easy cross reference for anyone who needs to look them up in a catalog. Some stamps would need more complex listings, but most would be pretty simple.

Being a developer myself (with 15 years of experience from SaaS) I can say the biggest challenges would not be technical ones. They're easy to solve.

The fact TKA doesn't exist is money, or more precisely lack of it. In order to to make TKA, you need some serious $$$ so that developers, hardware, software, data licensing, testers, legal advice etc. can be paid BEFORE AND DURING the development, prior to anything has gone out. And even after the release you need a steady flow of $$$ to maintain and support TKA.

But If playing devil's advocate... If all 30K APS members donated say $20 for the development of this for two years, and if catalog publishers had the interest to co-operate in stamp data + licensing (say a revenue split of some sorts), TKA would have been done long ago and available for anyone at very low subscription cost (say 20 bucks per year).

But right now we're living in a world where most of the stamp related apps are build by solo developers (not sure if even the biggest ones, say eZStamps have got more than just one guy)..... And with limited resources / money, the output is either crappy or expensive (the less users, the higher the price must be. We can all see how this is working with existing stamp software). So in the end it comes down to numbers... If stamp collectors genuinely want something like TKA to happen, then there has to be big unanimous vote for it. It would require major stamp organizations to back up the development of it, or maybe some sort of crowd funding with tens of thousands of supporters. But in the end the ball is with us collectors.

Just my 5 cents worth,
-k-