by SEO & Affiliate Consultant
M. Thomson
On November 12th, 2007 Google announced its Android challenge and threw down a tech gauntlet to encourage developers to create useful applications for Google's Android operating system for mobile phones.M. Thomson
Google received 1,788 entries, which were then filtered down to 50 finalists. One of the applications that bigmouthmedia expected to make it to the final was Jeffrey Sharkey's CompareEverywhere, formally known as Android Scan.
CompareEverywhere is an application that allows users to use their mobile phone to take a picture of a product's barcode which is then decoded and used to find the same product across a magnitude of websites.
This then allows users to find and compare prices for the product online in order to get the cheapest value. The same process can be applied to almost any product, from clothing to electronics - if it has a barcode, you can scan it.Offline vs Online Retailers
One of the problems when shopping online is that you don't get to view the product, try it on, size it, test it and visualise it before you purchase it - all the things you're able to do in real shops. However, CompareEverywhere allows you to compare online and offline retailers simultaneously in store, then find an alternative version of the product, potentially at a lower price.
The CompareEverywhere application could really shake up retailers and the way they price products. If this Android application makes it big, which bigmouthmedia suspects it will, this could kick start retailer price wars. It could take the "buzz word" window shopping to a new level; rather than actually window shopping for what you would like to buy, consumers could window shop for products they would like to own then purchase them elsewhere - at a cheaper price!
Google clearly spotted the talents of young Sharkey and snapped him up as an employee to work in the Googeplex. What is interesting is that Google Base is often perceived as a comparison engine; users can type in a product name and then get a list of prices and reviews from a wide range of providers. Add a pinch of Google's affiliate network and Google may have a new revenue generator, similar to the way Affiliate Window's Shop Windows works. Remember where you read it first.
