Are you a ShopSavvy user living in the DC area (including MD or VA)? Would you like to be on NPR? Yuki Noguchi from NPR wants to do a story about comparison shopping using cell phones. She wants to follow you as you shop in the capital area. How about it? Give ShopSavvy some love? Get your 15 minutes of fame? Email Yuki Noguchi with your contact info: ynoguchi@npr.org Thanks!
The Big in Japan team is splitting duties this week. Rylan and me (Alex) are in San Francisco at Google IO living the Android dream. Jason is back in Dallas, but will virtually be in Singapore at the CodeAndroid Meetup (via Skype). Want to connect with us at Google IO? Just email or txt amuse@biggu.com or 214.558.1079.
On a side note Scott and Cathy, our PR team, just had a baby boy named Benjamin (6lbs14oz.) check him out on Flickr. Congrats to Scott and Cathy!!! Welcome Benjamin!
The ever popular open source phone platform, Android, will make its way onto AT&T sometime this year. They plan to offer Android on the HTC Lancaster handset. Lots of details on Gizmodo. Here is a picture of the phone:
FYI – some commenters suggest that ShopSavvy won’t work due to AT&Ts decision NOT to include a variable focal length camera. Not so fast! Our work on project ‘meatloaf’ – i.e. getting ShopSavvy to work on fixed focal length cameras was originally done so that we could offer ShopSavvy on the iPhone. Thankfully, we can simply port that work back to Android and presto – ShopSavvy will work on AT&T phones! Rock!
There have been a few leaks about our new application, ecohero. Figured I would share some of the details with you all:
ShopSavvy has really come along way since version 1.0 was released last year. Our latest release version 3.5.0, code name Rodan, is now available in the market. Alternatively, you can download it from our website here. Rodan was designed for you – our users. Rodan includes:
If you find any bugs email support@biggu.com, Thanks for all your support!
Wow! Yesterday I asked our users to complete a short survey for our sponsor. THOUSANDS of you decided to help us out and complete the short survey. I was worried many of you would be annoyed at our request – ironically Svetlana wrote a post about my fear in a post titled, “Now How Evil is the Free Web?”
The survey has ended. Don’t you hate it when you enter a drawing and never find out who (if anyone) actually won? Well I do. I talked to our partner and asked them for the name of the winner, but they explained that the drawing is held each quarter across many surveys – i.e. you are more likely to win the lottery than the $250 prize we promised. So I decided that we would conduct our own drawing and award the $250 ourselves (we can afford it). I am pleased to announce that Shawn Miller from Bradenton, Florida will receive a check for $250 and a Big in Japan T-Shirt (Large as seen below). Congratulations Shawn and thank you for taking the time to help us help our sponsor.
Lots of folks ask how we are able to give ShopSavvy away for free. With thousands of applications sold for 99 cents or more many of you have suggested you might be willing to pay for ShopSavvy. To make a long story short, we had to agree to release ShopSavvy for free to obtain various agreements with our partners. This has helped us grow, but limited our upside.
We still need to eat so we found a sponsor willing to pay us for the right to include their name and logo throughout our application (a powered by [insert brand] type deal). I am not able to release the name of our new partner, but it is an important name in commerce and shopping. Our new partner has asked that we have our users fill out a short survey (FYI – you will find out the partner’s name in the survey) prior to the launch of our sponsorship effort – we sent out a notification to users asking them to “Help keep ShopSavvy free by filling out this short survey.” If you are a user you will get a short message in your notification tab – we predict many of you will be angry, but we ask that you either take a moment to fill out the survey (for a chance to win $250) or simply delete the notification. Please don’t send us an email suggesting how evil we are. Please don’t leave negative ratings in the market. Please realize that we need to make money so we can keep adding inventory and features to ShopSavvy. Thanks for your support and understanding.
Matt Buchanan shared this video of the new Android build to coincide with the HTC Hero (new Android handset). It is incredible. Check it out:
[via]
If you don’t have access to the Android Market or for some reason you can’t find ShopSavvy in the Android Market we created a direct download for you. Download ShopSavvy Here.
