ShopSavvy is getting a backend upgrade
The amount of shopping data ShopSavvy must manage each day w is amazing. This last week caused the team to realize we really needed to increase the capacity of our back end platform. Earlier today Rylan and Brian took a trip to the server store and brought home six new quadcore servers with 2 terabytes of storage each allowing us to bring on an additional 12 terabytes of capacity starting tomorrow (assuming we get the servers racked up in our server room). This new capacity should help us make it through the Christmas shopping season until we roll out our new social shopping features in ShopSavvy 4.2.
Have an iPhone with ShopSavvy 4? Looking to make some extra holiday cash? Does your high school / college student need a part time job during their winter break? We have the perfect deal for you.
We spent a lot of time working with news reporters all over the country during the past few weeks in preparation for Black Friday and the holiday shopping season. I am pleased to report that much of that work payed off. According to VMS news stations ran 543 (as of yesterday) stories on ShopSavvy around the United States. How did we do it? First we had a little experience. In 2008 and 2009 news reporters found us and came to our offices to see how ShopSavvy worked. We had pretty good coverage 30-40 stations ran stories. This year we decided to help reporters out by putting together a 
Holy Cow! There are more than a few of you scanning products today. Over the morning we saw so much traffic that Rylan had to DOUBLE the server/database capacity to handle the traffic. Some of you may have experienced a connectivity problem in the morning (half of it was the cell tower near the store you were shopping and half was our servers). Anyway, the new capacity seems to have everything working well (we still haven’t been able to figure out how to make the cell tower near you work better). Have fun and be safe!
There are a number of market comments on Android that indicate that ShopSavvy somehow drains battery life even when not in use. We have tested ShopSavvy on more than ten different models (including the NEXUS) for more than a thousand hours. Those tests reveal that ShopSavvy does NOT drain battery life when not in use. However, there are a couple of battery life tools that suggest that ShopSavvy is somehow using up to 5% of the battery even though it wasn’t even turned on. We have determined that the tools assume ShopSavvy is draining battery life because it leverages Android’s ability for apps to share resources. ShopSavvy stays in memory as long as you have available memory. It does not do anything until you actually use it, but the battery life tools assume that since it is in memory it is using battery life. All we can say is that they are wrong.
Be the first ShopSavvy user to add 1,000 products from Walmart to our system and win a Macbook Air for Christmas. Just head to your local Walmart and start scanning products. Add the missing products, titles and prices and if you are the first user to hit 1,000 you win!
