Newly launched Zoomingo is a shopping discovery app that aims to help you find nearby sales using either your Android or iPhone. With a focus on clothes, shoes, jewelry, handbags, beauty and home products, the app appeals to the everyday bargain shopper, not the daily deal seeker or the gadget guru looking to compare prices on HDTVs, for example.
Sales data for major retailers is available all across the U.S., including from stores like Nordstrom, Macy’s, JC Penney, Williams Sonoma, Target, Kohl’s, Dillard’s, Wal-Mart and more.
In total, Zoomingo has compiled sales data from over 70,000 retail outlets, using a combination of automated methods, manual data-gathering and “Deal Scouts” positioned in the top 10 U.S. cities. Currently, Deal Scouts are paid by the company to help pump up its deals database, but in the future, as the community grows, everyone will have the opportunity to be a scout. At that point, deal finders will be rewarded with badges, points and prizes, like retailer gift cards.
The company was founded by language learning service Livemocha’s co-founders, Shirish Nadkarni (Zoomingo CEO) and Krishnan Seshadrinathan (CTO). When Livemocha started, it initially hired language tutors to kick-start the community for the first few months of operation, before the crowd arrived. Now, they’re doing something similar with Zoomingo’s scouts. (And how we wish other services would do the same, instead of launching deserted, crowd-less wastelands!)
Even though my community (lovely Tampa, Florida) isn’t typically considered a top U.S. metro area, I was pleasantly surprised to find a ton of deals in my area for everything from kid’s toys to new handbags to beauty items and much more.
In the app, you can follow favorite stores and other Zoomingo users. Also, if you choose to connect with Facebook, you can follow your friends and help Zoomingo recommend better deals to you. (E.g., if your gender is “female” you might be shown perfumes, “males” may be shown men’s clothes).
As the community grows, you may find other users with similar interests and you’ll be able to virtually stalk their finds using a Twitter-like “follow” model. You can share your own finds too, by snapping a photo, adding a description and sale price.
A future version of the app will offer integration with check-in services from Foursquare and Facebook, instead of the in-app “check in here” option which doesn’t really do much for now. Later on, Nadkarni tells us, retailers could use Zoomingo’s check-in to push out coupons or other offers. Retailers will be able to host in-store scavenger hunts at some later date, too.
Nadkarni says he had the idea for the service after he took some time off from Livemocha, and found that his wife was having trouble locating nearby sales on mobile. So many apps were focused on price comparisons and barcode scanning (ShopSavvy, Red Laser), standalone check-ins (Foursquare) or promotions (ShopKick, Groupon), but there wasn’t a simple way to just browse local sales and search for items.
Zoomingo is currently self-funded.
The app is live now both on iPhone and Android.

October 12, 2011: The Day SMS Began To Die

I’m not generally one to predict the death of things. I’ve rarely been known to herald a shiny new Device X as a “Device Y Killer!”, and I’m a firm believer that Facebook is doing a perfectly good job of being “the new Facebook”. Pundits love to make these crazy claims because they’re easily forgotten and rarely does anyone call them out for being wrong after a few years have passed.
With that said: October 12th, 2011. Mark it down, and come back and yell at me in a few years if I’m wrong. Today is the day SMS begins to die.
It begins with today’s launch of iOS 5.
Or, really, it begins with iMessage.
Back in June, MG wrote that Apple had “finally stuck a dagger into SMS” with the announcement of iMessage. Today, they’re pulling that dagger out… and sitting back and laughing as the wound bleeds out.
You! Heading for the comments! Wait a second. (A crazy request, really, given that it’s 5 line breaks deep into this post. I probably should’ve put it right in the headline.)
To be clear, iMessage alone won’t kill SMS. It’ll just start the avalanche.
Today, many millions of people (and millions more, come Friday) are being shown something better. Besides updating to iOS 5, they don’t have to do anything to make it work. They don’t have to manually install an app; hell, they don’t even need to use anything they’re not already using.
This isn’t BlackBerry Messenger. There are no PINs to share. iMessage just knows when the person you’re texting can receive iMessages, and handles everything for you.
This isn’t Google Voice, with its free texting. There is no new app to install and use, or new service to sign up for.
This is many, many, many millions of devices, suddenly switching to a new protocol with little interaction from the user. This is millions of iPhones, suddenly sending a fraction of the SMS messages they sent before. The carriers are terrified, and rightly so.
Yes, iMessage only works from iOS device to iOS device — but that doesn’t matter. This is just the beginning of the end.
Next, iMessage support will come to iChat in OS X. Users will be chatting across platforms — again, with no new apps to install, and no new services to sign up for.
Next, Google will respond with their own, completely integrated Android-to-Android alternative. They already have such a thing to some extent with Google Talk — it’s just lacking things like photo messaging, read/delivery receipts, and the most important part: the seamless, almost entirely automatic integration. Don’t expect it to stay that way.
At a certain point, probably 2-3 years down the road, these proprietary services will be in no way unique. Any surviving platforms will likely have their own SMS alternative, and the concept will reach a point of entropy where they’re no longer directly beneficial to device sales. In fact, that they are not cross-compatible will be seen as a detriment to the concept as a whole — and at that point, the major players will begin working together on a cross-platform (but still carrier independent and agnostic) standard.
Users will grow accustomed to these service’s fancier tricks — the aforementioned read/delivery receipts, the typing status indicators, and the whole, you know, being free part. Users will see texting people via the old SMS system as antiquated; being SMS-only will be like being in a different area code in the mid 90′s. You’ll still get texts — your friends just won’t be happy about it.
SMS won’t go away completely, just as e-mail hasn’t entirely killed snail mail — it’ll just be a sad shell of its former self. It’ll hold strong for a few years longer in certain countries outside of the US, until a standard is set and the new protocol is embraced in feature phones. Companies will still harass you via SMS. You’ll still be able to vote for your favorite American Idol via SMS. But SMS, as we’ve known and loathed for far too long, as a ubiquitous and integrated part of our world’s communication, as an unjustifiable cash cow for the carriers, is dying. Good riddance.

TeleSocial Opens API, Allows You To Add Voice Chat To Almost Anything

Smack talk, that mainstay of online gaming since the invention of… well… the online game, is a fine art. To know when to call someone’s mother something nasty or to question your opponents sexual prowess is of paramount importance in almost any situation. That’s why Telesocial wants you to use their API to add voice chat to almost any program you can imagine, from office apps to games.
Telesocial is an angel-funded start-up dedicated to voice. They initially worked at adding voice to social networks – including Facebook – and have now opened up their work to programmers. Their system allows one-click calling between app users (you could yell at your opponent in Carcassonne, for example) and the creation of in-app conference rooms for multiple users.
You can use nearly any language to create what they call a TalkSpace and they have documentation for PHP, Objective-C, and command-line based instantiation.
Bill Waytena and Eric Stone founded the site in 2008 and they have always focused on voice in the social setting.
“The Telesocial API allows developers to add innovative voice functionalities to their games and applications,” wrote Eric Stone in a release. “Our API translates user IDs into phone numbers, creating a phone-numberless voice service that connects people anytime, anywhere on their favorite device, the mobile phone.”

The service supports multiple authentication systems and turns social IDs into “phone numbers” that are uniquely addressable by your apps. The API works with Facebook, Twitter, Android, and iOS.
Telesocial notes that the app is good for in-game chats (“Interested in calling the person who just watered your crops in that farming game?”) and call screening (“Want to screen your date with a phone call before going out with him or her – but not give out your number?”) and it supports anonymous mobile-to-mobile calling. It would also be perfect for a sort of illicit, sultry voice-only Chatroulette for lonely writers (just putting that out there, devs, no rush.)
The API is available now.