Well it is finally ready for beta testers (normal users should avoid this version). If you would like to help us out AND you have a newer Android phone like an Evo, Nexus One, Incredible and the Nexus S this build should work for you. (older phones will have to wait until the next build to work). Take it for a test drive and report your bugs to bugs@biggu.com – if you are the first to report a bug we will send you an official beta tester t-shirt. You will note that Android is getting a few cool features that our iPhone users won’t see for a few updates. Android makes it much easier for us to stay ahead. Anyway, let us know what you think. Download the beta here: http://bit.ly/shopsavvy4androidbeta

Lots of you email us each week and ask about our business model and our plans in general. I thought I would take a few moments here in the final hours of 2010 (before our guests arrive) to give you a behind the scenes look at the ShopSavvy platform.

ShopSavvy Explained (Part 1 of 5) – The App
ShopSavvy Explained (Part 2 of 5) – PriceNark
ShopSavvy Explained (Part 3 of 5) – QuickPay
ShopSavvy Explained (Part 4 of 5) – AdOns
ShopSavvy Explained (Part 5 of 5) – Deals

ShopSavvy allows us to use shopping ‘signals’ and technology to drive the BEST offers. 50% of our users visit the current deal tab in ShopSavvy. Today we syndicate deals through relationships with Groupon and Retailmenot as well as running our own deals. Our deal tab can target individuals, regions, shopping behavior and/or global audiences. We can push deals via notifications and allow for social promotion and crowd-sourcing of offers based on geography and product category. Our next version of Deals will be delivered via the AdOn framework in HTML5 and allow for quick re-rendering to suit the needs of the consumer – i.e. more services less plasma TVs or vice versa.

AdOns were first made available in ShopSavvy 4.1 and originally designed exclusively as our advertising framework. AdOns can leverage native features of the app using deployable HTML5 code. New features can be deployed without time consuming updates to the base application. Additionally, AB testing on the iPhone and Android is now feasible.

AdOns allow us to leverage UPC+GPS Pairs delivering coupons, rebates, warranties, games, facebook like programs, app promotions, targeted video, compare/contrast features, user generated content, loyalty card integration and so on. Finally, integrated with QuickPay, Adons can allow publishers to integrated a wallet into an app by simply dropping in our easy to use SDK.

QuickPay is our strategy to bring ‘augmented’ payments to mobile – fundamentally changing mobile shopping. QuickPay 1.0 removes buying inertia allowing a user to buy from any retailer using PayPal in just a few clicks without ever visiting the retailers website or store. QuickPay is tightly integrated in the App as well as our AdOn advertising framework. We achieved PCI DSS 1.2 compliance paving the way for QuickPay 2.0 that will allow users to pay with their Mastercard, Visa or AMEX cards from a much wider set of retailers.

PriceNark IV is the back end of ShopSavvy. It uses proprietary product search algorithms to deliver industry leading shopping results. The platform supports 33+ million product API calls per month and is housed in our data center in Dallas and in the cloud at Amazon. PriceNark makes those 33M calls to more than 40,000 retailers for more than 10,000,000 products. The technology was developed using .NET and leverages MySQL and Hadoop MapReduce to handle the more than 100+ million product attributes including price and inventory.

Using a proprietary ‘product karma’ system to deliver high quality results our system (according to one investment banking study) delivered 74 online and local results on average versus our largest competitor at 42. PriceNark V due in Q2 will expand product search sources for up to 10X better retailer coverage, product coverage, attributes and offers.

Lots of you email us each week and ask about our business model and our plans in general. I thought I would take a few moments here in the final hours of 2010 (before our guests arrive) to give you a behind the scenes look at the ShopSavvy platform.

Of course you have likely used our mobile app on the iPhone, Android or Windows Phone 7. This client app is part of a much broader shopping platform. Released in 2008 on Android, 2009 on iPhone and 2010 on Windows Phone 7 – ShopSavvy has been downloaded more than 10 million times and has more than 7 million users (our current run-rate is 2 million new users a month). On top of these downloads we have preload deals with various carriers and OEMs like LG, Samsung and Huawei making ShopSavvy available on more than 100 devices. Consumer Reports selected ShopSavvy as the best scanner technology and licensed our scannerkit SDK for inclusion in their own shopping app. This is only part of the story…

While ShopSavvy was born in 2008 alongside Android, I think 2010 will be remembered as the year Mobile Shopping took off. Millions of shoppers thought to pick up their smart phone to ‘find the best deal’ BEFORE they bought. Purchases made on cellphone more than doubled this year and are predicted to double again next year, cresting $40 billion by 2014.

While ShopSavvy is now growing at a 2 million user per month run rate, there are lots of other relevant shopping apps out there. In fact, our technology powers a LOT of them like CNET, Consumer Reports and PriceGrabber. While those licensees are impressive, the more impressive piece of data is just how many OTHER developers are using our scanner technology in their own shopping apps. You might be shocked by the number of projects using our technology:

- Android Projects: 2119
- iPhone Projects: 2779
- Windows Phone 7 Projects: 1
- Blackberry Projects: 1
- Nokia Projects: 1

Clearly a lot of you are using mobile apps in your everyday shopping experiences. I predict that 2011 will be remembered as the year Mobile Purchasing took off. Consumers are comfortable with the mobile shopping experience and the next logical step is to convert those shoppers into mobile buyers. ShopSavvy 4.1 due to release any day now allows users to use a one-click payment with retailers – Scan, Compare, Buy – three simple steps. Like the Amazon shopping app our goal is to make it easy to buy – but instead of buying from just one retailer ShopSavvy will let you buy from the retailer with the best deal (remember Amazon has the best price only 3.8% of the time).

There are 75 apps that are using the ShopSavvy barcode scanner SDK without an executed license agreement. We have attempted to reach out to all of you, but it would seem some of you are hard to reach. Starting tomorrow we are going to disable the SDK for non-licensed use unless we hear from you. The interruption will last 2 hours and is merely an attempt to get your attention. If we haven’t heard from you by the 1st we will permanently disable the scanner. Just drop us an email and let us know the status of your license agreement.

Our team is working hard to complete our 4.0 version of ShopSavvy for Android. We had a version that was ready for the Christmas shopping season, but decided to hold back when we found some bugs. Of course then we added (and removed) a few features based on the data we have been collecting using Flurry (i.e. what people use and don’t use in the 4.0 version on iPhone). Our objective is to be code complete by the 1st. If you are willing to test our beta please give us your email:

We have a couple older betas that you could test now (i.e. these aren’t the release candidates). The first is found here: http://bit.ly/shopsavvyblurry and is the OLD version of the app with blurry barcode scanning. The second is found here: http://bit.ly/shopsavvy4androidbeta and is a newer version of the app, but not the current beta we want you to test.