Michael of Frucall.com dropped me a note to let me know about their service. I love getting emails like this and learning about new mobile related services!
Frucall is a shopping comparison service for mobile users. Interestingly, you query the service by phone call. Here’s how it works: You’re out and about and thinking about buying a product.. but you want to know if you’re being taken for a ride by the store or not. So you flip out your handset, call Frucall, type in the product’s barcode ID number (or ISBN). Frucall then tells you the product’s price on Amazon and compares prices across the Yahoo Shopping service.
Where possible, Nasser, the CTO, has ensureed that Frucall will speak to you nicely through extensive use of recorded voices. Frucall only uses text-to-speech when necessary. I like that idea a lot.
You can easily bookmark products that you’ve queried to come back to them via the web at home. Or you can make some voice memos to remind you what you want to get. I can imagine this set of facilities being extremely useful indeed.
But there’s more 😉 While he’s not been busy overseeing the Frucall service (or on honeymoon — congratulations!), Nasser has been extending the service to offer sms text reminders. This is neat: You can create a ‘Price Watchdog’ for a product — and get a message to let you know if a product’s price changes or if a store is found offering the product at a particular price. Excellent!
As the site says:
Next time you’re out shopping, call us at 1-888-DO-FRUCALL (1-888-363-7822) before you take the item to the register.
Check out this wickedly good review of Frucall by Janine on the Amazon Web Services blog.
Thanks Ewan!
Ewan MacLeod of SMS Text News was kind enough to write a detailed article about Frucall on his site, and he being so detail oriented has not missed anything, including my honeymoon! Here’s Ewan’s post on Frucall. I should get…