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Catching Up With IntoNow Before The Republican Debate (Video)

Posted: 10 Dec 2011 12:59 PM PST

Social TV these days usually means a companion app on your iPad that lets you Tweet along with your friends and fellow fans while you are watching TV. These apps work best for live events (the one remaining time in the age of the DVR when a large mass of people actually watch an event at the same time). IntoNow, which was bought by Yahoo and launched its iPad app last month, is partnering with ABC News to provide live audience polling during the Republican debate tonight for people who “tag” the debate inside the app.

If you are not familiar with IntoNow, it is like Shazam for TV shows. With one click, it gathers an audio profile from the iPad’s microphone and figures out what show you are watching. Then you can see related Tweets, and chime in. Adam Cahan, the founder of IntoNow who still leads the product at Yahoo, came by our office in New York to give us a demo of the new iPad app. The video is above.

Today Amazon Will Give You $15 To Use PriceCheck and Screw Local Retailers

Posted: 10 Dec 2011 09:05 AM PST

Amazon PriceCheck App

Today, December 10th, Amazon is offering a very special deal you’re going to love and your local brick-and-mortar retailer is going to hate. Use its PriceCheck mobile app and get 5% off your purchase, up to $5 at a time, as many as 3 times. Why the discounts to use PriceCheck? The app is designed to get you to visit local shops, try out a product, submit valuable pricing data to Amazon, leave without buying anything, and make your purchase on Amazon instead.

Actually scanning an in-store item isn’t technically required to get the discount, though Amazon doesn’t make this clear at first. The webpage for the deal states “Get a 5% discount just by checking a price”, but you can check a price by typing in a product’s name from home without submitting a local price. If you read the terms it says “In-store price submission and location confirmation are optional.”

Amazon explains the local pricing data helps it offer competitive prices. That’s exactly right. Because it offers such a wide range of products and makes the real money from hooking users on its shopping experience, Amazon can afford to lower its prices to beat out brick-and-mortars. PriceCheck helps it identify which products it needs to put on sale, and the one-day discount will get shoppers used to looking on Amazon for these deals.

Now, I’m no luddite. Efficient technology’s march over old models is natural and inevitable. But using shoppers to gather reconnaissance on its offline enemies is pretty aggressive. It also promotes show-rooming where users get the benefit of checking out a product in person, but then neglect the shops that pay overhead to offer that service.

There’s little that brick-and-mortar stores can do to stop this. If they berate people for scanning their products with PriceCheck, they’ll just push them right into Amazon’s clutches. Shoppers will have to decide whether to take the discount, or support their local mom-and-pop or even their local Walmart which at least keeps jobs nearby. But in this economy, most people’s allegiance is to their wallet.