With only 2 and a half years on the international market, Apple's iPhone has become one of the largest global smartphone companies, accounting for one fifth of total sales. One of the biggest factors behind this has been a nearly 50% year-over-year growth seen in the third quarter of 2009. With this growth comes huge opportunity in the apps or application sector. Apple’s App Store currently has over 100,000 applications available, showing the popularity and growth in the industry. Latching on to a winning concept can result in windfall earnings for any investor, take for example the iFog app. One application that caught our eye recently, was the pic2shop app. Since we are a comparison shopping engine, we are always interested in seeing how the marketplace is evolving. And, as an added bonus, pic2shop has integrated Shopzilla content to supply shopping options to its user base. We caught up with the creator of pic2shop, Benoit Maison, to find out a little more about the application, and his thoughts on the future of smartphone technology.
Bryan: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Benoit. Tell us a little about pic2shop and exactly what it is.
Benoit: pic2shop is a free iPhone application. It reads barcodes using the iPhone camera, and then looks up and compares prices at online retailers.
Bryan: How did the idea come about?
Benoit: It all started as a technical challenge: reading barcodes with the iPhone was supposed to be impossible because the fixed focus camera made them all blurry (that was before the iphone 3GS). The first working version of pic2shop was released in April'09, and there was a lot of worldwide interest immediately. Since then, we have perfected the barcode scanner, made it work in real-time on the iPhone, and added many retailers and millions of products to our database.
Bryan: The pic2shop team has been working with Shopzilla for several months now. How has the experience been?
Benoit: It has been very rewarding. We chose Shopzilla early on because it was the most expedient. But Shopzilla turned out to have to best product coverage for our purposes (UPC lookup), and to give great affiliate revenue. We are very excited that the program is now available in the UK, France and Germany!
Bryan: You currently use our Catalog API; how has the integration process been?
Benoit: Having an API was more convenient than, say, an FTP feed. As volume increases, we just need to cache results. Integration was very straightforward, and we never had to make any change since then. As a developer, that's the highest praise I can give.
Bryan: Mobile applications are becoming ever more present on the market, where does your application figure in terms of category relevance?
Benoit: Besides games, comparison shopping may be the category with the broadest appeal. Who does not like to get a better deal? We are looking for ways to increase the appeal of pic2shop, so that it is the first place iPhone users and retailers turn when they think of comparison shopping. Many people are not even aware that this stuff is possible, but when they learn about it, the reaction is invariably an enthusiastic "Wow! How do I get it?"
Bryan: What makes pic2shop so unique/important to the market?
Benoit: Well, definitely the real-time barcode scanner. Just point the camera at a barcode, wait a second, click! You get the online prices and links to explore further. There are only three apps (out of 100,000!) on the App Store right now that can do that, and pic2shop is the most flexible of the three. In many ways, it is like a mobile browser with barcode input. It can show prices of course, but also product specifications, user reviews, demonstration videos, coupons, anything you can dream of. Some manufacturers want to build their own iPhone app, and we license the barcode reader to them, but some are just happy to give us material to include in the results.
Bryan: In your own personal opinion, how much success can be achieved with this type of application, and how far can this technology go?
Benoit: I believe that mobile advertising will soon be larger than online advertising. It can reach people wherever they go, not just when they sit at their PC. If it's not intrusive, it can provide tremendous value by being highly relevant and timely. It is not clear how the technology will evolve. For example, will people want dedicated apps, or just mobile web sites better integrated with their phone's camera, GPS, and other capabilities? We will probably see a few iterations before the dust settles. In the meantime, we'll take pic2shop as far as we can.
Thank you for your input Benoit, and we hope to see pic2shop evolve into a leader on the marketplace! For anyone interested in finding out more information or wanting to download the app (it is free to download!), head over to the pic2shop website.
