Have you ever been shopping in a store and wondered if the price that was listed on a product was actually a discount? Being both a bargain hunter and penny-pincher, this is an issue that plagues me on a nearly daily basis. But what if you could use the power of the mob to determine if you were looking at a steal or highway robbery? SnapTag aims to do just that by leveraging the power of both Facebook and Twitter in your favor, by polling your followers about an impending purchase.
This form of crowdsourcing is certainly nothing new to social medial, but SnapTag certainly streamlines the process dramatically. Easily the best part is that the application is that not only is it tremendously helpful, but completely free as well. We will leave you with a short trailer that details how you can use the tool to make your shopping life much easier. It is definitely worth a look.
Are you indecisive? Paralyzed by making the most mundane of decisions? Don't have a coin on hand? Well, then, the answer ought to be simple. Turn to your friends to make all of your banal decisions for you!
Okay, okay, I kid—sort of. In fact, there's an app for this problem, too...or there will be soon. With upcoming app QuikPiq, you'll be able to snap a photo of each potential choice, and the app will create an online poll that you can instantly post to Twitter or Facebook, or just send as a private link. The app's developers suggest a number of uses, from choosing a shirt at the mall to picking a restaurant for dinner. Personally, I see it as being far more useful for decisions that affect more than just your own life—imagine sending a poll to all your friends, asking which movie everyone wants to see when you meet up for the weekend.
While QuikPiq has yet to be released, the developers have fleshed out the process pretty well. After creating your poll, you send it out to your friends. Then, they have the ability to vote and comment on your options, and you'll receive the results from within the app. Additionally, your friends won't need to download anything in order to vote. Ideally, shortly you'll have everyone's opinions on hand to facilitate your own decision-making.
Of course, QuikPiq is competing with an old and established means of making decisions...using your own brain, or, well, actually asking your friends. However, it does have the added advantage of being able to ask all your friends at once, and the incorporation of pictures sounds like a nice use of the cameras embedded in our ever-present iPhones. Look for QuickPiq sometime in 2011. As the website notes, the app is currently in "top secret mode" but you can sign up to be a beta tester, if you wish.
The promotional video below demonstrates the awesome, not-yet-realized power of QuikPiq.
Ask any advertiser what the most important things about ad development are and they're sure to say "target audience" as one of the points. With over a quarter of a billion downloads to date, the App Store caters for a great spectrum of demand from business to entertainment, finance to games, social networking to utilities. Fine-tuning this broad spectrum is no easy task for application developers, where price levels and targeted advertising can be just as important as the application itself. Inevitably, there are great applications out there that just have the wrong price or the wrong advertising. The result? A wrongful position in the App Store.
Earlier this week Dreadnought Design, the iPhone games company led by John Thornewill, launched the first "in a series of research initiatives designed to better understand the characteristics of the fledging iPhone games app market." Available only through their official Facebook page, this is a one-question only poll to see how much iPhone (or iPod Touch, we assume) owners spend on new games each month.
Votes like this don't just help the developers, but end users too. If developers become more aware of how much users are willing to spend, then prices can be adjusted accordingly to allow customers to reap the benefits of their application. We encourage you to vote.
"The iPhone games market is very dynamic. Demand for game apps has exploded over the past 18 months or so, and very little is known about the people who buy the games and play them, and what motivates them to like or dislike a game," says John Thornewill, CEO and lead designer at Dreadnought Design. "The more we can know about iPhone gamers - who they are and what they like - the better we, as iPhone game developers, can serve them."
The poll remains open until October 31, where the data will be published on Dreadnought Design's website for free.
