I just saw this app reviewed on AppAdvice and thought it could be of some use to CRM Archaeologists. The app is called Pupil, from Doozy, Inc., and is available for the iOS and Android platforms.

Main screen. Press the "pupil" to open the camera.The company slogan for Pupil is, "take a picture, get an answer". Imagine if we had that in CRM? I'm thinking that this would work especially well for historic artifacts. I'm not going to presume that I know everything about historics, as no one should, which is why working as a community would work well. Of course, the information gained from using this app could never be cited but it's a great start if you are completely stumped. So, how does it work?

This is the bottle base that I uploaded.You start by creating a quick account. You then choose categories that you know something about so you can be asked to identify things for other people. It's a community app, after all. There really isn't a good category to put most artifacts in but I'll discuss a possible work-around in a minute.

Once you've created an account (all free, by the way) you are ready to Pupil it! On the app's main page is the Pupil icon. Clicking on this will open your camera. Take a picture, resize if needed, and ask your question. You'll be asked to put the question in a category. I tried this on a bottle that I have in the house and put it in the category, "Other". I was then prompted to tag the entry with my own tag, since I choose "other", so I entered, "Historic Bottles". I just did all of this today so I haven't received any responses yet. I doubt there are many archaeologists that have seen this app yet.

This is what my entry looks like with the tag I created. No responses yet!Let me know what you think of this app and its potential. I'm always interested in trying out new things and I want to know if anyone else is, or will, try this. We probably have to build our own community of users. If we do, we might be able to get the devs at Pupil to create a few more categories for us.