Category: Computers/Internet

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Android Community reports that ShopSavvy will soon be getting real-time inventory data from local stores. This will be very nice, as I’ve run into the occasional issue where things didn’t quite line up.

ShopSavvy is an app for Android phones that uses the camera to scan product barcodes, then looks up pricing from local and online stores. You can also do a text search if you don’t have a package handy.

Two failures I can think of were:

Outdated Sale Price. I wanted to pick up the Pushing Daisies DVD set. ShopSavvy told me that Circuit City (this was before the liquidation) had it for something like $18. I got there and they wanted something closer to $30. I forget whether it was a sale price that had just ended or whether it was only some locations that had the cheaper price.

Web/In-Store Discrepancies. After dithering for a year, I finally decided to get a new printer this weekend. (Okay, the old one stopped working.) I found a decent price/feature combo on TigerDirect, then found a much better price for the same printer on Amazon, but I didn’t want to wait two weeks for delivery or spend an extra $20+ for faster shipping. So I looked it up on ShopSavvy, which told me that MicroCenter and Costco both had it for just eight dollars more than Amazon.

I looked up the printer on MicroCenter’s website, which claimed it was in stock at the local store. But it also claimed it was refurbished. I went to the store, found the display model on the shelf, saw the price I expected (with an “As advertised!” note), and no mention of it being a price for a refurbished model. Then it turned out that they didn’t have any in stock.

So I hit Costco. As near as I can tell, they only sell the printer through their website, but ShopSavvy listed it under local. As long as I was there I looked at the printers they did have, but nothing matched the specs I was looking for. (Small mono laserjet with built-in network, preferably wifi, for less than $150.) Finally I just ordered it through Amazon, who in a fit of amazingness shipped it immediately, and say it should arrive tomorrow.

In this case it would probably still have failed with MicroCenter, since their website had the wrong info (or else someone bought the last one in the time it took me to drive there), but I would at least have known there was no point in looking at Costco.

G1 photo by spdorsey, used under terms of CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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On my way to a doctor’s appointment before lunch, I heard a song on the radio that I liked and wanted to find out more about. I never assume that the DJ will actually identify the song, but I remembered I had Shazam on my G1, and for once it actually managed to identify the song! (Usually I’m trying to ID background music in a restaurant or shopping mall or someplace where half the time I can’t even recognize the song if I do know it). Thankfully for my dignity, it wasn’t Paris Hilton, but rather “What’s In The Middle” by The Bird and the Bee, from their new album Ray Guns Are Not Just The Future. (As it turns out, since it was Morning Becomes Eclectic, the DJ did name the song afterward. But still.)

Now, Shazam is very smart in that it offers a link directly to the song on the Amazon MP3 Store. So I could easily have just bought the song for 99ยข when I parked the car, except…

With unfamiliar artists, I like to at least check out the rest of the album and see whether I want just the one song, or more. And whether it’s a failing in Shazam’s app or the Amazon MP3 app, I could not find a way to go from the song to the album. So I shelved it until later.

Afterward, I opened the Amazon MP3 app by itself, searched for the group, and opened up the album. Another smart thing: If you preview a song on an album, it will go down the whole list playing a clip from each song. I turned up the volume, started the car, and listened to a summary of the whole album on my way to lunch. I decided I liked enough of it to hand over $9 for the lot and see if the remaining songs grew on me, so after I parked the car, I tried to buy the album.

Then I was told that MP3 purchases had to be downloaded over WiFi. WTF? I had a strong 3G signal, and I’ve downloaded large apps (iVerse’s comics and some games are on the order of 5 MB, comparable to a song in MP3 format) over 3G before. Sure, it takes a while, but it’s on the order of minutes, not hours. Naturally the place I’d gone to didn’t have WiFi, and I’m not at the point where I trust it to hold the downloads until the next time I connect to a wifi network. Which will probably be when I get home.

The end result was that I had an entire afternoon to second-guess my decision to purchase the album.

In summary:

  • Good: Shazam makes it easy to buy the song you’re hearing right now from Amazon.
  • Bad: Shazam doesn’t make it easy to buy the album on which that song appears.
  • Good: Amazon makes it easy to listen to samples of an entire album.
  • Bad: Amazon won’t let you download an album unless you’re at a WiFi hotspot.

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It looks like the campaign to reclaim BlogExplosion is working! The efforts to bury the forum spam have brought new members into the site, and earlier this week a new administrator appeared on the forums, banning over 55 accounts used by spammers and deleting 13,000 spam posts. This morning, the banner approval I’ve been waiting for since August finally went through.

Things are looking up!