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.
Last month a ShopSavvy user in Hamburg Germany named Kilian Hughes emailed me asking if he could use our logo to print on t-shirts for a ‘stag party’. I agreed on the one condition he send us pictures. Evidently one of his mates was marrying a Japanese girl and they wanted everyone to know they were ‘Big in Japan’. From what I heard Kilian would have made any fan of The Hangover very proud. Well Kilian kept his part of the deal and sent this photos:
The only outward sign
Okay, I really appreciate all of the calls, but it is hard to rest if I have to repeat the story every five minutes. I decided to write this post to get everyone up to speed (again I appreciate the concern, it is really surprising).
Yesterday Brad and I were in West Village (here in Dallas) headed to lunch at Mi Cocina when I got hit by a car. We were walking towards the valet stand when I was struck. The car, being driven by the valet driver, was traveling at a relatively high rate of speed (witnesses say 15-20mph), in reverse going the wrong way down a one way street. Brad was behind me and jumped out of the way. When I turned to see what was going on the mirror of the SUV hit my arm, spun me around and threw me to the ground. It was pretty spectacular – everyone came over figuring I must have been badly hurt. Fortunately I was able to get my feet the only obvious injury was where the SUV’s mirror struck my arm (scraped up). I went to the doctor where they cleaned my wound, gave me a tetanus shot and a bunch of prescriptions for pain. My arm hurt like crap yesterday, but I didn’t really feel that bad. This morning I woke up and couldn’t get out of bed. My whole body is sore – I guess getting spun around and thrown to the ground isn’t very good for your back. Anyway, I am going to be fine so no need for flowers. Here is a diagram for those who are visual/spacial:
Job Description:
We are looking for Asterisk Developer; you will be responsible for leading development of the next generation of VoIP applications and features. As a member of the development team, you’ll be involved in all stages of the software development cycle, with particular focus on design and architecture.
Required Skills & Qualifications:
• College or University degree.
• Excellent understanding of VoIP telephony with a particular focus on SIP and the related protocols and standards.
• 2 years of hands-on experience with Open-Source VoIP Platforms Asterisk and Freeswitch, SipX, OpenSER, etc.
• Experience in troubleshooting and fine-tuning of data networks for VoIP using wireshark, tcpdump, ngrep, etc.
• Significant experience with Linux, including administration and optimization of high performance server-type applications. Also should have experience with maintaining a Subversion code repository to support the complete software development process.
• 5 year experience in programming in Linux environments, using any number of the following: Perl, C, C++, Python, AWK, Bash, etc.
• Good analytical and troubleshooting skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communications.
Assets:
• Familiar with .Net Architecture, Web Services using SOAP, and experience with building database applications MySQL, MSQL, PostgreSQL etc
• Solid understanding of web-based architectures and programming, including data-driven e-commerce websites.
• Demonstrable history of technical leadership driving small development teams to deliver high quality software on time and on budget.
• Experience with call-processing architectures, including event-driven finite state machine(FSM) and multi-threading programming techniques.
• A portfolio of previous telephony projects you’ve been a part of, we would love to see a demo of them.
• Project organizational skills.
What We Offer
• How about the opportunity to join a fast-growing company and be part of a fun and dynamic team. You will be working directly with some of the best professionals in the world.
Please send your resume and cover letter to jdonica@architel.com. In your cover letter please reference the position you are applying for and provide a short introduction on why you believe you would be a good fit for the position.
Something struck me after I watched Steve Jobs stumble during his presentation at WWDC and it was reported that there were 500 personal wifi (or mifi) networks active in the presentation room: what will this mean for Skyhook (and Google’s competitive project)?
Skyhook and Google ‘listen’ for wifi network as they drive the streets of cities worldwide. They map these wifi networks and then applications like ShopSavvy use this data (much quicker than GPS) to determine where a users is located. Sure there have been minor problems before. For example, if someone located in the US sells his Wifi Router to someone in the UK AND assuming Skyhook mapped the wifi in say Houston – we think the users near that wifi signal are actually in Houston and not the UK (this has happened two or three times to our knowledge).
Now that millions of users will have their own personal wifi networks that move how will that impact wifi-based location services like Skyhook? I have ALWAYS thought Skyhook had a genius solution, but I never really considered how the owners of wifi networks might feel about a third-party building an entire business off of their infrastructure. Of course Skyhook isn’t building their business of of a single infrastructure – but millions of wifi access points. Perhaps it is time to really think about whether or not we want our wifi used by third parties to determine the location of their users. Maybe we could come up with a prefix on our networks – i.e. ‘okay use me, I stay put and oh by the way my lat/lon is x’ or ‘please don’t use me, I move around or I just don’t want to share my data with you’.
I, of course, would share my wifi with Google and Skyhook and let them know its exact lat/lon on my home wifi, but I would hope that my EVO and Sprint 4G card wouldn’t be mapped because I move them around with me. What do you think?
*wipe sweat from brow* 
Lots of our partners have wondered whether or not Apple would allow our AdOn network inside of iPhone apps. AdOns are HTML5 ‘ads’ related to a) the product scanned and b) the location of the product scan. The good news is that Apple’s latest developer license agreement SPECIFICALLY allows Big in Japan to operate our AdOns network. Leena Rao has an interesting take on the updated rules by Apple.
More on AdOns™:
Mobile ads delivered by companies like AdMob don’t work very well right now. First they distract and annoy the user OR they are completely ignored by the user. Second, they don’t generate much in the way of revenue since they are rarely acted upon. We decided NOT to put ads in ShopSavvy and I think the app has been better because we made that decision. But we did find a way to leverage the data we had (i.e. the UPC of the product scanned and the location of the user) to deliver information about the item the user was holding in his hand.
ShopSavvy is a simple app that tells the user where he can find the item he is scanning and how much the item sells for, but we kept having all of these ideas to make our app better. Things like coupons, allergy alerts, recall notices, wine info and so on. We couldn’t figure out how to include these ideas without cluttering up the app – i.e. feature creep. Then we had an idea to create a plugin framework, what we call AdOns.
AdOns appear ONLY when there is relevant information about the product scanned. Immediately following the scan screen your app delivers the result (in ShopSavvy we show the item’s picture, title, web and local offers). The AdOn scrolls up from the bottom of the screen without interfering with the function of your result page (you can still interact with your app). AdOns take up only as much space as needed to provide the necessary information – almost never past the middle of the screen. To dismiss the user simply swipes the AdOn down. Finally, new apps won’t see AdOns for the first 90 to 120 days until we get your onboarded into our system – you get a free ride for a while.
What sort of AdOns exist? movie and video game trailers, sample music tracks, allergy information, food safety information, coupons, rebates, product demos, wine info/helper, sports/concert titckets, computer configurators, memory card matcher, battery matcher, what’s not in the box, alternative/related products, product reviews (text and video), warranties and so on. Got an idea for an AdOn – let me know and we will create it. AdOns are usually sponsored – e.g. Video Game Trailers sponsored by GameFly or sample tracks sponsored by Pandora. In all cases AdOns MUST look cool and provide real value to the user without screwing up your app.
Finally, we allow complete filtering for ANY reason. Don’t want to see your competitors in AdOns? No problem. Don’t want to see certain items for health reason? No problem – you have the right to reject ANY AdOn for any reason.
Jake and Rylan thought it might be smart to run one of those ‘tweet to win’ contests here at Big in Japan. I aim to please so Aaron quickly (in a day) put together this simple promo. Just visit this link – ShopSavvy Promo – and 1) follow @shopsavvy and 2) tweet the included message for a chance to win either (your choice) an iPhone 4 or HTC EVO. Pretty simple. Hopefully the folks who tweet about ShopSavvy will actually download the app (i.e. users are more valuable than followers). What do you say?
ShopSavvy Tweet to win promo - win an iPhone 4 or HTC EVO
