Frucall is a mobile service that tells you if you can get a better price for something online than you can in a store. You call a number enter the upc and then learn of the best price on the web for an item. It's an interesting idea and the service seems to offer some cool interactions between phone, web, and people. It seems that if you like the price they tell you on the phone that a call center agent will place an online order for you, and users can also use the service to bookmark items and leave themselves notes. I'm not sure how they handle the fact that items online are usually less expensive than those in stores minus the shipping and occasional sales tax charges but perhaps that is up to user to figure out. I don't think I'd use it but I am interested in the way that they are interacting with typed in UPC codes.
An approach more up my alley was being taken by a project called I Buy Right which matches images of UPC codes up to a database of socially conscious product attributes. The project looks like it has ground to a halt for the time being amid some unfortunate fortune hunting circumstances. As I read about the project I began to think that it would work better if one could sms the upc to the database rather than take a photo. Surely that would be easier to do than the photo scanning they were planning. I actually think I would use something like this and am sorry.
The NYT has some really interesting services in this article and I'm very excited to try Google's.I've yet to try Google's sms service but am excited about that.
For, for an ad-free option, there is a little-known Google
service. Send a text message to 46645 (that’s “Google”; leave off the
last E for efficiency). In the body of the message, type what you’re
looking for, like “Roger McBride 10025” or “chiropractor dallas tx.”
Seconds later, you get a return message from Google, complete with the
name, address, and phone number.
FREE ANSWERS Google’s
46645 text-messaging service can fetch much more than phone numbers. It
can also send you the weather report (in the body, type, for example,
“weather sacramento”), stock quotes (“amzn”), where a movie is showing
nearby (type “flushed away 44120”), what a word means (“define
schadenfreude”), driving directions (“miami fl to 60609”), unit
conversions (“liters in 5 gallons”), currency conversions (“25 usd in
euros”), and so on.
Another service I would use is one in which you could sms the name of a fish and get back a report about whether it was good to eat it. I carry around a chart in my wallet but it would be easier to text the name of the fish and get something back. Any takers?
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