The other day I read about mplayit Android Arcade on TechCrunch. Living inside of Facebook, mplayit helps Facebook users discover Android applications. Leana Rao explained how the site works:
“Once you start clicking on various app and downloading apps, Mplayit will begin to recommend apps to you based on your behavior on the site. And you can share apps on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook page also shows the activity that’s taking place in other app marketplaces, such as Apple’s App Store or the Android Market, to show users what apps are receiving the most downloads, reviews and more. Users will also be able to see the “apptivity” within their social network, so they can clearly see what apps their friends and family are most interested in.“
Of course I have become more of a fan since they included ShopSavvy as their number one featured application (as seen below):
Earlier this month ShopSavvy® began supporting QR Codes AKA 2D barcodes. ShopSavvy supports standard QR Code instructions including URL redirection, Phone Dialing, SMS Messaging and Contact Addition. Retailers, brands and advertisers can leverage ShopSavvy’s name recognition and installed base of users (more than 4.5 million as of January 2010) in their QR Code promotions and marketing. This is a FREE program designed as a win-win for marketers and ShopSavvy.
Simply overlay the ‘Scan with ShopSavvy’ badge on top of any QR Code and ShopSavvy users will be alerted that they can scan the code. Users who don’t have a reader are instructed to download our reader (for free) from the shopsavvy.mobi website. To use the ShopSavvy name and graphic you must receive permission (via email) which will not be unreasonably withheld (generally we just want to try to up-sell you). Just let us know how you plan to use our graphic and name and send it to sales@biggu.com.
While consumers will be able to leverage ShopSavvy they will ALSO be able to use ANY barcode scanner than supports QR Codes. LOTS of phones have the ability to scan 2D codes natively – your QR promotion will work on any of these devices unlike proprietary barcodes.
Options
custom download link, i.e. brand.com/shopsavvy (links to custom version of ShopSavvy with brand’s messaging in footer – 320×36px)
location aware QR Codes, i.e. we can report GPS (lat/long) to advertiser for each scan.
custom 1D programs, i.e. proprietary UPC/EAN codes linked to your actions (for agencies who wish to keep their programs proprietary).
Rylan pushed an update of the ShopSavvy iPhone app to iTunes this evening. Scanning is FAR easier on 2G and 3G iPhones with this version, but it doesn’t include our ‘Filet’ scanning code for 3GS iPhones which should be uploaded tomorrow or at the latest (at least Rylan is promising) by Friday. What is new in this release? First, it shouldn’t crash all of the time. Some of you noticed that after a few uses ShopSavvy would crash. It would continue to crash unless you rebooted. This is fixed. Of course this crash wasn’t a simple problem – literally TONS of bugs were fixed to resolve the issue. What else is new?
Get Directions Update – now you can get turn-by-turn directions (in map view) inside of ShopSavvy without leaving to to the Maps application (of course you can still open the Maps.app if you really want to). This is pretty huge – not sure of any other apps doing this (if you know of one let me know ASAP so I can call Jake’s bluff).
Augmented Reality Feature – we call it ‘Radar’ inside of ShopSavvy. Now you can view products in list view, map view or RADAR view. Try it out, it is lots of fun.
Web Browsing Feature – this new feature allows you to browse retailers websites inside of the app without leaving (i.e. you don’t have to open MobileSafari each time) making browsing faster.
Email Feature – this new feature allows you to email products to yourself (or friends) without leaving the app and launching the Mail.app – again making the experience faster.
The thesis of this update (besides fixing our bugs and making scanning work better) is to keep users inside of the app as much as possible creating a seamless shopping experience. Let us know what you think. Of course Apple still needs to approve the update – lets hope we get one of those 8 hour approvals.
We thought it would be fun to start doing a video series called ‘Will it Scan’ (an homage of sorts to Will it Blend). Jake and Brad put on their custom ShopSavvy lab coats and recorded the first episode in ONE take. In our first episode we scan six common household items – the point of the demo is to show that, yes they will scan, but maybe you shouldn’t be scanning low value items. The best use of ShopSavvy is for books, dvds, games and electronics – items with lots of price variations between local retailers. We are still trying to come up with a theme song and next time we will try to cut it a little shorter. Let us know what you think:
Last week we announced QR Code scanning support for ShopSavvy (3.6 on Android) and got a lot of attention at the CES show. About an hour ago my dad posted a question to my Facebook page asking, “Ok, what is a QR code?” I guess most of you have no idea what a QR Code is or why it might be helpful to have ShopSavvy scan the code. I will try to help.
QR codes are two-dimensional codes (as seen on the right) that were created by a Japanese company called Denso-Wave back in 1994 to track vehicle parts during manufacturing. Unlike one-dimensional barcodes that only contain eight to seventeen digits, QR codes can contain up-to 7,089 numeric characters, 4,296 alphanumeric characters, 2,953 binary bytes or 1,817 Japanese characters. This data storage was VERY important PRIOR to the Internet. QR codes were invented about the same time as the World Wide Web and as a result the value of having an ‘un-connected’ barcode that held significant data became less and less important. Sure QR codes proliferated in manufacturing, supply chain applications and shipping, but outside of Japan and Korea their use in consumer applications has been almost non-existent.
So why aren’t they popular in consumer applications outside of Japan and Korea? Largely because if you can scan a one-dimensional barcode with an internet connect device brands, manufactures, retailers and advertisers have more control. They can provide different information to consumers based on time of day, day of week, season, location of user and so on. With a QR code that must be printed they have no control – whatever data existed at time of printing is the data that will be in the QR code. Why would anyone bother to create a code that couldn’t mean different things for different people? You can’t put a price in the QR code – because prices change. You can’t put product recall data into the QR code – because product recalls happen AFTER printing of product packaging. Of course you CAN insert a URL into a QR code and direct a user to a webpage – but you can do the same with a one-dimensional code and almost 100% of products ALREADY have a 1D code. So why are QR codes big in Japan? I think the primary reason is that they can contain 1,817 Japanese characters (Kanji/Kana). Almost ALL mobile phones in Japan have the capability of reading QR codes. NTT Docomo established the de facto standard for encoding URLs and contact information – all using Kanji/Kana.
Previously I have written about why we didn’t support QR codes. Recently Google announced their Google Favorite Places program whereby Google mailed QR code window stickers to something like 190,000 local retailers. These QR codes are tied to Google local search feature and allows the retailer to include coupons and special offers to users who scan the codes. In light of this new feature and its connection to retail shopping we decided it was time to support QR code scanning. ShopSavvy will now scan all 1D and 2D barcodes. Try scanning the code to the right (it is my contact info) and feel free to let me know how you like the new changes in ShopSavvy for Android (iPhone QR scanning support coming later this month).
I spent the last week at CES talking about ShopSavvy and checking out all of the cool new gadgets our users will be scanning. We demo’ed our two new ShopSavvy features including QR Code scanning support and Augmented Reality product and retailer search (we call it ‘product radar’). Everyone thought the augmented reality feature was cool, but I was really surprised by the number of meaningful conversations focused around QR Codes. Publishers, retailers and manufacturers all wanted to talk about how we could help them leverage QR Codes.
While at the event I carried my Nexus One and almost everyone had to check it out. Hanging out at the LG Booth I was uber-impressed by the 6.9mm thick (or thin) LED television (picture below), but the LG rep just wanted to play with the active wallpaper on my phone. Of course, this was just part of the story. The biggest ‘buzz’ after you tried out four or five of the 3D televisions was all about Android. Scott Fulton wrote about the ‘android buzz’ suggesting, “Android has emerged from CES 2010 as the software platform story of the year.“ Android was at the heart of so many of the coolest new gadgets I lost count. Some of the more exciting Android-based gadgets included Motorola’s Backflip and the Alex e-reader. The Android-based gadgets spanned segments including automotive, home theater and games. Android was the ‘Intel inside’ of LOTS of devices.
(reposted from my personal blog) Since launching ShopSavvy back in 2008 we have participated in one or more online polls or votes each quarter. I groan a little each time, but at the end of the day we need the exposure winning might create. For example, last year we were nominated for a Crunchie by internet voters, but ultimately lost out to imeem (ahem). More recently Tim O’Reilly’s team pitted ShopSavvy against our primary competitor in something called the O’Reilly iPhone Smackdown. About the same time we found out we were also nominated for the CES Mobile App Showdown. Both contests relied solely on internet votes.
Of course we have a small advantage in these sort of internet based polls/votes – we have millions of users. Any time we get into one of these online contests we ask our users to vote. For example, we created a bit.ly link for the O’Reilly vote and sent it to a segment of our users via a push message. We kept the message live for three days sending more than 61,000 voters to the O’Reilly website to vote. Click here to check out the stats for yourself. Ironically about 10% of these folks voted for our competitor because they viewed the request as ‘SPAM’ (which it sort of was, but hey the app is free so we should be able to ask a favor every few months). Earlier today we got a note from O’Reilly explaining that they had taken down the poll (we were winning by about 80% or so). Here is the note:
Thanks for your note and apologies for the confusion. We pulled the smackdown because there was lots of bot traffic skewing the results. It seems that our web team implemented the smackdowns with fairly naive, casual poll software. Votes are handled by simple <a> links with only modest cookie-based attempts to prevent multiple votes from the same machine, all of which means that they’re quite susceptible to skewed results via bots. In this case, it looks like a bot or spider stumbled into the page and kept pounding both vote links. I’ve removed this smackdown from the site and will hold off on additional smackdowns until we find out more and/or get a more robust poll solution in place. We’ll give the smackdown another try then. Again, sorry for the trouble.
I suspect they weren’t used to so much traffic. We reached out to them and shared the bit.ly stats so they could determine that the source of the traffic was most likely from actual voters. Of course it is a little frustrating that we used our ‘goodwill’ to generate votes only to have those votes discarded. I doubt we can ask these users to vote for us a second time for the same contest.
The CES Mobile App Showdown is still underway (8 days left). We are currently in first place with 16,457 votes. We have limited the number of users who have received a push request to vote for us so that we don’t swamp the CES servers. I couldn’t help but feel that it was silly that we had to limit the number of requests so that we didn’t skew the votes too much in our favor (as we did in the O’Reilly vote). As long as these sort of votes/polls persist we will happily participate, but I wouldn’t mind some sort of multilateral agreement whereby we would all agree not to have online votes/polls. How about you?
You would be surprised by the number of barcode scans we see for beer, wine and spirits. Thousands per day, but sadly we have VERY few prices (local or online) for alcohol. Are you a retailer who carries alcohol? Want exposure to millions of American shoppers who drink? Give us an API to your pricing and we will send our potentially intoxicated users to you. Email sales@biggu.com ASAP.
Update: More than a few (maybe 10) online spirits retailers contacted me about including their products in ShopSavvy. Thanks! But we still need local retailers in the system. If you know of a local retailer suggest to them that they should be in ShopSavvy…
Earlier this month ShopSavvy® began supporting 
We thought it would be fun to start doing a video series called ‘Will it Scan’ (an homage of sorts to 
(reposted from my 
You would be surprised by the number of barcode scans we see for beer, wine and spirits. Thousands per day, but sadly we have VERY few prices (local or online) for alcohol. Are you a retailer who carries alcohol? Want exposure to millions of American shoppers who drink? Give us an API to your pricing and we will send our potentially intoxicated users to you. Email sales@biggu.com ASAP.