1 Jack Daniels 70cl
2 Blossom Hill White Zinfandel
3 Eristoff Original 70cl
4 Southern Comfort 70cl ???
5 Moet & Chandon NV
6 Baileys 70cl
7 Bacardi Superior 70cl
8 Jameson 70cl
9 Jagermeister 70cl
10 Concha y Toro Cas Diablo Cab S
11 Desperados 33cl Btl
12 Bombay Sapphire Gin 70cl
13 Absolut 1ltr
14 Veuve Clicquot Brut NV
15 Drambuie 70cl
16 Bollinger Special Cuvee
17 Tia Maria 70cl
18 Malibu 70cl
19 Gallo White Grenache
20 Smirnoff Ice 27.5cl Btl

So it blew me away to learn that the fourth most popular scan is Southern Comfort. Really? Southern Comfort in Ireland?

Lots of retailers like Best Buy plan to include QR Codes in their stores to help consumers learn more about the products they are selling. Look for the strange little two dimensional barcodes near product displays. You can scan these codes with ShopSavvy and you will receive the information that the retailer is interested in providing to you. Of course, you can still scan the one dimensional barcodes (i.e. the UPC or EAN code) on products and get the standard price comparison you have come to expect from ShopSavvy.

Just as ShopSavvy can scan these QR Codes from Best Buy we can also help retailers power their own apps with 2D reading technology. Both our iPhone and Android developer SDKs offer QR Code scanning support – just drop our libraries into a retailer’s mobile app and consumers can begin scanning right away.

Of course 2D codes are popping up on websites like Facebook and in stores thanks to Google’s Favorite places program. We support both of these programs today. Perhaps the most interesting use of 2D codes is by cities. In Washington DC we now support scanning of QR codes in DC Circulator Buses. This month the city added QR Codes on all bus stops and bus shelters. Riders who have ShopSavvy can scan these codes to see a map of their route, their current location and the next bus stop.

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.

“…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.

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!