starfish: app details

STARFISH Jeff Grimes – iOS Development and Product Lead Prashanth Bala – Backend Development Trevor Assaf – Image Processing Matt Safian – Design

Problem •  Women and girls have lots of nail polish. •  Friends often ask “Nice nail polish! What color is that? What

brand is it? Where’d you get it?” •  But it’s difficult to remember which brand and color it is.

•  Starfish is an iPhone app that solves this problem. •  Users snap a picture of nails they like and get color and brand

matches from Essie, OPI, L’Oreal, and other top brands. •  They can browse and purchase matching nail polishes.

Think “Shazam for nail polish.”

Solution

Snap a picture of nails. 1

Browse top color matches and complementary colors.

2

View details and purchase. 3

Features and Technical Details • Make slight adjustments to color after taking picture to

compensate for different lighting conditions. • Get results in under 1.5 seconds due to scalable database

built in Scala (functional paradigms) with Akka Actors concurrency model.

• Purchase nail polishes with one click through Amazon. • No open-source algorithm exists that trivializes the problem

of color-matching with Amazon products, so we designed our own algorithm – a hybrid of several proven image analysis techniques.

•  The algorithm’s final step maps the color space of Amazon products to HSV for vector analysis.

The Story of Starfish • Created in 24 hours at Greylock Hackfest 2013, an

invitation-only hackathon held by Greylock Partners in San Francisco at Airbnb headquarters.

• Starfish won Top 10 honors out of 60+ teams. •  The team is working now to add the finishing touches to

the app and release Starfish to the App Store.