Starfish is Shazam for nail polish. Snap a picture of nails you like and get color and brand recommendations for nail polish from Essie, L'Oreal, OPI, and more. Browse and purchase any nail polish with one click.

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

2. 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

3. Snap a picture of nails.1

4. Browse top color matches and
complementary colors.
2

5. View details and purchase.3

6. 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.

7. 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.