NBC showed up at our offices today with a camera crew to film yet another story on ShopSavvy.  Thanks for the coverage guys!  Watch it on the late news tonight.

According to a research report issued by RBC Capital, Amazon controls over 33% of the e-commerce market in the United States.  They are clearly on the top of their game, but are losing their heart?  Recent actions by the monolithic e-commerce Juggernaut that is Amazon are causing more and more users to question the company’s competitive practices.

For example, Joshua Odmark learned the hardway that Amazon has stopped paying affilliates their commission when the affiliate uses a URL shortener like tinyurl or bitly.  Last week Amazon cut off four different affiliate partners that supplied ShopSavvy with product data.  The reason?  Amazon doesn’t have the resources to support mobile applications.  Nobody including people like John Gruber can understand why Amazon would seek to limit the distribution of their data and ultimately their ability to sell their goods.  Finally, earlier today Wil Shipley, internet rockstar, had to remove his uber-popular application Delicious Library today after receiving notice from Amazon he would be cut off.  Ouch.  Dan Moren from Macworld responded, “this blanket ban on mobile apps is bizarre and, to put it bluntly, stupid.”

We love Amazon.  What they have done for online commerce has been truly remarkable.  In many ways, they set the stage for apps like ShopSavvy.

Unfortunately, we have had difficulty incorporating Amazon products among the more than 20,000 retailers and 2 million products that are part of ShopSavvy.   It’s not a technical issue; with access to Amazon’s product API, we could include all Amazon products in the ShopSavvy database immediately.  But for reasons that are unclear to us, Amazon has not yet given us this access.

For a while, we have been able to work around this problem, because a number of our partners had access to Amazon’s API, and we were able to display Amazon results through them.   But now Amazon has essentially cut this option off, meaning that only a small percentage of Amazon products now display in ShopSavvy results.

We’re not sure why Amazon is reluctant to be part of ShopSavvy, but we know that our 1+ million users would benefit from having access to Amazon’s prices as they comparison shop for books, movies, music, games, electronics and many other types of products.

We intend to plead our case directly to Amazon again soon — and we will need your help.  Let Amazon know that you want their product results to be part of ShopSavvy.  Tell Amazon they should join Best Buy, Wal-Mart and the 20,000 other retailers who allow their products to be accessed by ShopSavvy users.

If you had asked me which major manufacturer of mobile phones would NEVER build an Android phone I would have said, “Nokia”.  Turns out I would have been wrong.  The owner of Symbian, the most prolific mobile phone operating system, is building an Android based phone.  Wow.  Read more here.

UPDATE: Nokia, evidently, wasn’t ready for the proverbial cat to get out of the bag.  Nokia said today, “Absolutely no truth to this whatsoever [to the rumor].”

Several of you have asked that we host another AndroidDevCamp here in Dallas.  How about we host a MobileDevCamp (iPhone/Android/Palm) on a Saturday sometime this summer?  Maybe July or August?

My thought is that we host a three track event:

Keynote: 10AM

Track 1: iPhone

• 11:00-11:30AM Session One iPhone
• 11:30-12:00AM Session Two iPhone
• 12:00-1:00PM Lunch/Break (Together)
• 1:00-2:00PM Workshop (Together)
• 2:00-3:30PM Session Three iPhone
• 3:30-4:00PM Session Four iPhone
• 4:00-5:00PM Networking/Drinks (Together)

Track 2: Android

• 11:00-11:30AM Session One Android
• 11:30-12:00AM Session Two Android
• 12:00-1:00PM Lunch/Break (Together)
• 1:00-2:00PM Workshop (Together)
• 2:00-3:30PM Session Three Android
• 3:30-4:00PM Session Four Android
• 4:00-5:00PM Networking/Drinks (Together)

Track 3: Palm Pre

• 11:00-11:30AM Session One Pre
• 11:30-12:00AM Session Two Pre
• 12:00-1:00PM Lunch/Break (Together)
• 1:00-2:00PM Workshop (Together)
• 2:00-3:30PM Session Three Pre
• 3:30-4:00PM Session Four Pre
• 4:00-5:00PM Networking/Drinks (Together)

If you are interested in hosting one of the sessions please ping me ASAP.  Just explain what you plan to discuss and tell me a little about yourself (a short bio would be nice).  Email: amuse@biggu.com

We need your help!  We get one or two emails each day from users who can’t find ShopSavvy in the Android Market.  There are mentions of this problem in the Android Market support forums, but our contacts at Google can’t replicate the issue (we were able to replicate it once very early on, but not recently).  This is worrisome, because most users won’t even realize that ShopSavvy is missing because they aren’t looking for it.  How many downloads are we missing?  No one knows.

We get lots of emails – positive and negative – and we have learned to take many of them with a grain of salt.  But yesterday, our friends at Amazon reported the ‘missing Android app issue’ and they were adamant that ShopSavvy was missing from their Android Market application.

How can you help?  Please visit the market right now.  Look under All Applications and sort by popularity.  Take a picture of that screen (screen grab or just a plain photo) and email it to support@biggu.com – let us know if ShopSavvy was missing.  Your help is much appreciated.  If we can replicate the problem on a large scale a) we will know there is a real problem and b) our friends at Google might be able to figure out what is going on.  In the meantime if you don’t have ShopSavvy and can’t find it in the market just Download ShopSavvy Here.

Update: lots of you have reported the problem since this post. Thanks for your help.  Here is an example of ShopSavvy missing from the Android Market:

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!

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:

• Faster barcode scanning
• Faster product searching
• Faster load times
• Faster animations
• Fewer bugs (knock on wood)
• WiFi and GPS setting retention (i.e. we won’t override your settings)
• Notification of whether or not an item is in stock or out of stock
• LOTS more local retailers and items
• Improved batter life
• Improved accuracy for product search
• Improved EU support
• Registration is now optional
• Option to search by title if product is not found
• Google Product Search integration (scan barcode from their mobile website)
• Visit retailers website inside or outside of ShopSavvy
• Additional UI polish

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.