Earlier this month ebay announced they had purchased Occipital’s Red Laser iPhone application. According to our sources, ebay paid $10 million dollars for the application and it’s 2 million users. The deal was an asset sale and the Occipital team will not be joining ebay. We are working on several potential deals and the sale of Red Laser for $10M has caused more than a few people have asked why we think ShopSavvy would be worth MORE than Red Laser. I thought it might make some sense to put ShopSavvy and Red Laser in context now that a price has been set.

Red Laser was very similar to ShopSavvy in that it allowed a user to scan a barcode, but instead of building their own backend product inventory and pricing platform they leveraged comparison pricing data from The Find and Google. Most of the ShopSavvy development is focused around what we call ‘PriceNark’ – our system for delivering local and online inventory and pricing from retailers to ShopSavvy. In 2008 we purchased the assets of a text book price comparison website called Textbook Trader which formed the basis of our price comparison platform. PriceNark allows us to deliver direct feeds from retailers, feeds from third party aggregators and web scraping with shopping cart insertion. Here is a side-by-side comparison:

Red Laser v.               ShopSavvy
iPhone Only                  iPhone and Android
2,000,000 users          5,000,000+ users
-                                       AdOn Advertising Network
-                                       PriceNark Backend 20K+ Retailers
-                                       Dedicated and Passionate Team

How do we feel about the $10 million ‘comp’? To be honest we were pretty pumped when we learned about the deal. Based on a simple ‘per user’ valuation of $5/user ShopSavvy is easily worth $25,000,000. But I would argue that our backend system is every bit as powerful and valuable as a local comparison engine like Milo.com (valued at $15M+). Additionally our advertising network not only includes ShopSavvy installs, but also PriceGrabber, CBS Interactive/CNET and more than 100 licensees leveraging our barcode scanner SDK and AdOn framework. By the end of the summer we expect more than 10,000,000 mobile phones will run our advertising framework. At the end of the day we think the Red Laser/ebay deal is a very positive comparable especially when you take into account our user advantage, local/online shopping engine and advertising network.

Do you like to shop? Do you like getting good deals? Do you have an iPhone? Do you want to make a little spending money this summer? If so we might have an opportunity for you and your iPhone.

We make a comparison shopping application called ShopSavvy (available on iPhone and Android). We have great coverage from electronic retailers, but poor coverage from grocery stores and hardware stores.

We will provide you with a custom iPhone app that will allow you to collect data about the products sold in various stores. Simply scan the barcodes of a product, type in the product title, take a picture of the product, enter the name of the retailer and enter the price. Repeat. The data will be included in ShopSavvy helping consumers around the country get the best deal on products.

Interested? Email jdonica@architel.com and let her know where you live, if you have transportation and confirm you have an iPhone (if you have an Android phone let her know too).

Like us, Sean Owen gets a LOT of requests to allow users to be able to store his Android app on an SD card. This is a new feature in Android 2.2 and despite not being available to the general public we get a number of requests each day to allow storage of our app on a phone’s SD card. Sean makes some interesting points in an email response:

“…requestors seem to have little understanding of the implications of enabling this. It means the app cannot function when the SD card is unavailable — for example, when it is mounted as a USB volume. It means it forcibly quits when it’s mounted. For Barcode Scanner, and probably others, this seems like an unacceptable issue, which will yield itself even more support mails. This, for an app that is only 400K to begin with, for which moving to SD has little benefit.”

Rylan, our lead developer, thinks Sean makes a good point suggesting, “it’s more than just flipping a switch and everybody is happy.  Some folks will be confused by the added complexity and extra management requirements.  It’s probably still worth doing, but we should not be in any hurry -  Android 2.2 isn’t even out to the general public yet”

I wrote about our inclusion of this feature in ShopSavvy a while back here. During our testing it was obvious that while the code is very simple, the complexity for most users makes this a less than obvious decision. Stay tuned as we work on coming up with a solution that makes everyone happy.

As of yesterday we now have as many downloads on iPhone as we do on Android. It has been a long time coming but now we have just north of 40,000 downloads per day on iPhone (equal to our 40,000 on Android). 80,000 per day equals 560,000 per week or 2,400,000 new users per month.  ShopSavvy is now the 19th most popular iPhone application and 2nd most popular utility.

From appFigures:

Our friends at Seesmic mentioned that they saw ShopSavvy in the same LG campaign their app was featured in. ShopSavvy and Seesmic were featured in the LG Optimus GT540 campaign in France. Gotta love the LG love. Thanks guys!

Friday was the biggest day yet for ShopSavvy. We crested 30,000 downloads for the day on iPhone and continued our 40,000 download level on Android. At this rate we will be adding 70,000 total user per day,  500,000 per week or 2,000,000 per month.

All of these new users are generating more and more load for our systems. We had to ramp our scanning servers AND price comparison servers for the EVO launch. We are now having to ramp to support our new found popularity on the iPhone. On Monday our team is meeting to nail down the release date for ShopSavvy 4.0. I have a early version on my phone and let me tell you it is AMAZING.

Alternative Title: We are serious about Windows Phone 7

We are pretty serious about getting a foothold on Windows Phone 7 with our ShopSavvy app (click here to request a beta version). To that end we were fortunate to be able to recruit Matthias Shapiro for the job. Working alongside our team, Matthias will be responsible for the ShopSavvy user experience on Microsoft’s upcoming mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7.

Matthias is an award winning Silverlight and WPF designer (read more: RNC Award, CNN, O’Reilly) and author of the Designer Silverlight Blog. He has been active as a Silverlight UI designer/developer for years, promoting the use of ‘Expression Blend’ as a design and development tool through tutorials and open projects. Matthias is the perfect example of the ‘interaction designer’ – halfway between designer and developer. His submission on Silverlight and Information Visualization to the MIX2010 conference Open Call was one of the highest voted entrants, earning him a spot as a MIX2010 speaker.

On the Windows Phone 7 front, Matthias was a usability lead and UX designer for the Veracity Solutions “Pillbox“. Pillbox is an open source Windows Phone 7 project demonstrating the use of LOB design and development within the WP7 development enrivonment. It was described by Charlie Kindel, Microsoft Partner Group Program Manager for Windows Phone developer experience as “Flipping brilliant in SO many ways!”

Frankly we are humbled that Matthias would join us in our effort to build the very best mobile shopping app on Windows Phone 7. Check out Matthias live:

We are looking for an executive with extensive retail e-commerce experience to join our team. The best candidate will be located in San Francisco, New York or Dallas. After looking through LinkedIn I am fairly sure we could find someone local and that might be the best option, but we will consider bringing on the right person despite their geography. Send your resume to Jennifer Donica at jdonica@architel.com and she will schedule a meeting/call if it makes sense.

Our growth on Android has been pretty remarkable (25% of new Android users download ShopSavvy), but we haven’t seen that same level of penetration on the iPhone. That seemed to change today. For some reason we began seeing more and more downloads of ShopSavvy – more than we have ever seen before. Starting around 7AM ShopSavvy was the 200th most popular app on the iPhone and the 19th most popular Utility. This trend continued throughout the day until around 8PM where we leveled off at the 78th most popular app and the 5th most popular utility. See the following chart from Appfigures:

Thought it might be fun to share some of the latest ShopSavvy stats. I posted that Google was seeing 160,000 Android activations per day. The more interesting number (for me at least) is the percentage of those users who download and install ShopSavvy. Not counting pre-loads on Samsung and LG ShopSavvy is downloaded on 25% of new Android phones. Get that? 40,000 downloads a day right now! Most are coming from Google’s Android Market, but a surprising number are coming from alternative markets like GetJar. On the iPhone side of the equation ShopSavvy is now a overall Top 100 App – No. 87 out of 200,000 apps!