The International Classified Marketplace Association (ICMA), a prestigious international association, proclaimed Croatian Njuškalo’s photo recognition of items the most innovative product in the field of classified ads, in the global competition for 2017. The Innovation Award is yet another acknowledgment for the first and only such application of artificial intelligence on the global advertising market that gives users a much faster and easier way to place their classifieds.
“The functionality behind the photo-recognition of items is at the very top of the world’s trends and the application of artificial intelligence that literally recognizes photographed objects and classifies them in the appropriate category of ads. I’m exceptionally proud of colleagues who took our dominant market position and millions of submitted ads as the foundation and designed the product with which we will continue to grow as a digital leader in innovations. Also, the latest award will have a special place on our award shelf, because it’s main characteristic is transparent live judging by all conference participants, among which are numerous global market experts,” said Sanda Soptija Šiljak, CEO of Njuškalo.
Namely, ICMA’s contest system implies that an expert jury determines the finalists, and the winner is the one with the highest scores of all participants at the gathering in Vienna. In the category ‘Don’t stop me now – Innovation award’, Njuškalo’s competition were Makaan.com and Hibe IT (Lehrberuf.info), but Njuškalo’s innovation most impressed the gathered world experts based on the criteria of innovation, creativity, sustainability and results.
Photo recognition is part of the Njuškalo’s mobile app, and was developed and implemented by Njuškalo’s in-house team in collaboration with members of the Styria Data Science team and companies Trikoder and Undabot. This team jointly came up with an advanced feature for users, based on machine learning and Njuškalo’s vast database, and its unique application enables fast and accurate positioning of items in the relevant category. Users who use this feature place their ads 70 percent faster, regardless of whether they use Android or iOS platform. These results are made possible neural networks of Njuškalo, which take about fifty milliseconds to find the correct ad category based on photo recognition. Njuškalo claims that the accuracy of item recognition is 86.5 percent, and the app places more than 70 percent of the ads automatically in the correct category, saving users 2.7 less clicks on average per ad placement.
