Introducing RoomHints, A Home Design App

How would you like to use your phone to take photos inside your home and upload them to get design tips from professional designers? The RoomHints app, founded by Tiffany Willson, lets you do just that. The app also makes it super-easy to shop for items for your home.

To use the app, you can upload a photo of your home or of an item you're thinking about buying for your home. RoomHints uses "decor matching algorithms" to suggest items to decorate your room based on the photo you've uploaded. You can also request advice from designers, and/or that designers manually choose items that they would recommend for your room, which they then send to you as "Hints."

The RoomHints app was recently recommended in the Consumer Reports' ShopSmart guide as the best app for home design shopping advice.

There's a community of designers all over the world who contribute advice to RoomHints. If you post a specific question, you can get advice within seconds. And the visual aspect of the app is very useful because designers can actually see your room and/or the product(s) you want to buy and make recommendations based on what they see.

Keep an eye on this app because I suspect it will explode as more and more people use it to design their rooms--and more and more designers and retailers sign on to participate in the community behind the app.