Blake Scholl and Jason Crawford are two Amazon alumni transferring their e-commerce background and social product discovery experience to mobile in the form of Barcode Hero, an iPhone application that is receiving a massive update today.
Barcode Hero is designed to be a community where people share product recommendations through barcode scans. The application [iTunes link], a product of Scholl and Crawford’s KimaLabs, originally launched in August. Today’s update better surfaces those recommendations to help app users make more informed purchase decisions while shopping.
In version 1.0, Barcode Hero users could scan barcodes on products, leave short product comments and give their review in the form of a thumbs up or thumbs down. The application was built to be incredibly social in nature, so users could find and follow friends, post products to their social networks and compete Foursquarefoursquare
-style to become the king or queen of each of the 50,000 product categories.
With version 2.0, the focus shifts from sharing to recommendations, so users can now scan products to see recommendations from friends. For instance, users can scan a bottle of wine to see reviews on that bottle, but also uncover the most highly recommended wines in the same category, according to the community. Of course, there’s also price comparison additives to ensure that users aren’t getting ripped off.
The updated app now supports browsing and search for products, photo uploads for additional points and the ability to discover if users’ address book contacts are using the app.
Scholl was reluctant to share specifics around application users or downloads, but he did disclose that users are very active — 30% leave thumbs-up product recommendations and 10% leave short product comments. Apple also plans to feature Barcode Hero in a list of featured holiday shopping apps beginning today, which should cause a spike in downloads and activity.
Barcode Hero resembles a slew of other applications including Stickybits and myShopanion. What makes it unique is its core purpose is to help people choose amongst products. The founders also don’t plan to add rewards in the immediate rewards, which prevents the app from infringing upon the store scanning and rewards zone that Checkpoints and Shopkick occupy.
Barcode Hero has raised $770,000 in seed funding from top notch backers including Ron Conway’s SV Angel and former MySpace CEO and Amazon alum Owen Van Natta. The company will likely raise an additional round next year.
Image courtesy of FlickrFlickr
, littleREDelf
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