Jul
2
The folks at AdMob put together a chart detailing the popularity of various Android handsets and with the exception of the EVO, ShopSavvy’s popularity on the handsets is almost exactly the same. The most popular ShopSavvy phone is the Droid followed closely by the Hero. The EVO is is quickly moving up the charts, now the fourth most popular Android phone and poised to overtake the Hero.
Jun
29
Earlier this month ebay announced they had purchased Occipital’s Red Laser iPhone application. According to our sources, ebay paid $10 million dollars for the application and it’s 2 million users. The deal was an asset sale and the Occipital team will not be joining ebay. We are working on several potential deals and the sale of Red Laser for $10M has caused more than a few people have asked why we think ShopSavvy would be worth MORE than Red Laser. I thought it might make some sense to put ShopSavvy and Red Laser in context now that a price has been set.
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.
Jun
28
Like us, Sean Owen gets a LOT of requests to allow users to be able to store his Android app on an SD card. This is a new feature in Android 2.2 and despite not being available to the general public we get a number of requests each day to allow storage of our app on a phone’s SD card. Sean makes some interesting points in an email response:
“…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.
Jun
27
As of yesterday we now have as many downloads on iPhone as we do on Android. It has been a long time coming but now we have just north of 40,000 downloads per day on iPhone (equal to our 40,000 on Android). 80,000 per day equals 560,000 per week or 2,400,000 new users per month. ShopSavvy is now the 19th most popular iPhone application and 2nd most popular utility.
From appFigures:
Jun
26
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!
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