Tuesday, August 4, 2009

ShopSavvy Gets New Competitor, From Amazon

On the heels of losing access to product information from Amazon.com, Dallas-based Big In Japan now has additional competition: an Android application from Amazon itself. Big In Japan develops the mobile comparison shopping application ShopSavvy, which allows Google Android and Apple iPhone users to take a picture of bar codes on their mobile phone camera and get shopping comparisons. This morning, Amazon said it has created its own, Android application called Amazon App For Android, which adds the ability to scan barcodes or take a picture of products for ordering directly from Amazon. Big In Japan's Alexander Muse reported in early July that Amazon had restricted access to pricing and product information from mobile applications. Muse, in response to the Amazon application, claimed that the new Amazon app is not a competitor to ShopSavvy, because Amazon's application does not provide price comparisons, and only pricing from Amazon. "ShopSavvy is a price comparison application - we allow users to compare prices from more than 20,000 online and local retailers. The Amazon app only allows a user to find out the price Amazon sells the product for." Muse said.