Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

my2cents: enabling research on consumer-product interaction

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Barcode scanners for smartphones enable mobile product-centric services for consumers. We have developed a mobile app that enables consumers to share their use of and opinions about products with their friends and others. Our goal is to establish a product-centric information stream generated by users to benefit other consumers and retail businesses and to enable large-scale research on consumer-product interaction. This paper describes our approach to create a sustainable service. We report first experiences and an initial evaluation after releasing the app to the public, give an overview over possible business models, and discuss some of the challenges we experienced during implementation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://my2cents.mobi.

  2. Calculation based on an app generating 250 user comments per day and running for 3 years.

  3. Numbers from the Android market statistics 29 July 2010.

References

  1. Cachon GP, Swinney R (2009) Purchasing, pricing, and quick response in the presence of strategic consumers. Manag Sci 55(3):497–511. doi:10.1287/mnsc.1080.0948

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Lesser EL, Fontaine MA, Slusher JA (2000) Knowledge and communities, Butterworth-Heinemann

  3. Dellarocas C (2003) The digitization of word of mouth: promise and challenges of online feedback mechanisms. Manag Sci 49(10):1407–1424. doi:10.1287/mnsc.49.10.1407.17308

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Jansen B, Zhang M, Sobel K, Chowdury A (2009) Twitter power: tweets as electronic word of mouth. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 60:2169–2188. doi:10.1002/asi.21149

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Dwyer P (2007) Measuring the value of electronic word of mouth and its impact in consumer communities. J Interact Market 21(2):63–79. doi:10.1002/dir.20078

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Brody AB, Gottsman EJ (1999) Pocket bargain finder: a handheld device for augmented commerce. In Gellersen HW (ed) Handheld and ubiquitous computing. LNCS 1707, Springer, Berlin, pp 44–51. doi:10.1007/3-540-48157-5_6

  7. Adelmann R, Langheinrich M, Floerkemeier C (2006) A toolkit for bar-code-recognition and—resolving on camera phones—jump starting the internet of things. In: Proceedings of the workshop on mobile and embedded interactive systems (MEIS’06) at Informatik 2006, Dresden, Germany

  8. Novak J (2005) Ubiquitous computing and socially aware consumer support systems in the augmented supermarket. Workshop on social implications of ubiquitous computing at CHI 2005 (UbiSoc 2005). Portland, Oregon, US

    Google Scholar 

  9. Resatsch F, Sandner U, Leimeister JM, Krcmar H (2008) Do point of sale RFID-based information services make a difference? Analyzing consumer perceptions for designing smart product information services in retail business. Electron Mark 18(3):216–231. doi:10.1080/10196780802265728

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Reischach F, Guinard D, Michahelles F, Fleisch E (2009) A mobile product recommendation system interacting with tagged products. In: PERCOM’09. Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on pervasive computing and communications, IEEE, Washington, DC, pp 1–6. doi:10.1109/PERCOM.2009.4912751

  11. Reischach F, Michahelles F, Guinard D, Adelmann R, Fleisch E, Schmidt A (2009) An evaluation of product identification techniques for mobile phones. In: Gross T et al (eds) Human-computer interaction. Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC13 conference in human-computer interaction (Interact’09). LNCS 5726, Springer, Berlin, pp 804–816. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-03655-2_88

  12. Krug S (2009) Rocket surgery made easy: the do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability problems. New Riders Press

  13. Karpischek S, Michahelles F (2010) my2cents—Digitizing consumer opinions and comments about retail products. In: Internet of things 2010 conference (IoT2010), Tokyo, Japan, November–December 2010

  14. GS1 Mobile Commerce: opportunities and challenges—A GS1 mobile com white paper (2008) http://www.gs1.org/docs/mobile/GS1_Mobile_Com_Whitepaper.pdf. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  15. Elkin N, Mobile Advertising and Marketing: change is in the air, eMarketer report (2009) http://www.emarketer.com/Reports/All/EMarketer_2000591.aspx. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  16. Reischach F, Karpischek S, Adelmann R, Michahelles F (2010) Evaluation of 1D barcode scanning on mobile phones. In: Internet of things 2010 conference, Tokyo, Japan, November–December 2010

  17. Pang B, Lee L (2008) Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Found Trends Inf Retr 2(1–2):1–135. doi:10.1561/1500000011

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Lee D, Jeong O, Lee S (2008) Opinion mining of customer feedback data on the web. In: ICUIMC ‘08 proceedings of the 2nd international conference on ubiquitous information management and communication, ACM, New York, US, pp 230–235. doi:10.1145/1352793.1352842

  19. Amazon Associates Programme Participation Requirements, https://partnernet.amazon.de/gp/associates/promo/participationrequirements. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  20. http://insideresearch.com. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  21. Goebel M (2010) Germany’s friendticker recycles foursquare, but with a real CRM backend http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/germanys-friendticker-recycles-foursquare-but-with-a-real-crm-backend/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  22. Stickybits—tag your world, http://www.stickybits.com. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  23. Android Developer Contest I Top 50 Gallery, http://code.google.com/android/adc/adc_gallery/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  24. zXing, http://code.google.com/p/zxing/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  25. What the sale of Red Laser means for ShopSavvy http://www.biggu.com/2010/06/29/what-the-sale-of-red-laser-means-for-shopsavvy/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  26. Kooaba, http://www.kooaba.com/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  27. Google Shopper, http://www.google.com/mobile/shopper/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  28. codecheck.info, http://www.codecheck.info. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  29. Ha A (2009) GoodGuide raises $3.73M for ethical shopping. http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/19/goodguide-raises-373m-for-ethical-shopping/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  30. Schonfeld E (2010) Stickybits rolls out “Official” branded bits, signs up pepsi as first advertiser http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/07/stickybits-pepsi/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  31. http://mono.hatena.com/. Accessed 11 Jan 2011

  32. Manninen JP (2010) After checking in at retailers, Booyah zooms in on products http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/26/booyah-product-check-in/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  33. Mirasense ScanDK, http://www.mirasense.com/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  34. ZBar bar code reader http://zbar.sourceforge.net/. Accessed 22 Oct 2010

  35. Michahelles F (2010) Getting closer to reality by evaluating released apps? In: Workshop research in the large at Ubicomp 2010, Copenhagen, Denmark

  36. Scandit, http://www.iscandit.com/. Accessed 11 Jan 2011

  37. Bakodo, http://bako.do/. Accessed 11 Jan 2011

  38. Barcode Hero, http://barcodehero.com/. Accessed 11 Jan 2011

  39. Myshopanion, http://www.myshopanion.com. Accessed 11 Jan 2011

  40. Workshop Research in the Large at Ubicomp 2010, Copenhagen, Denmark

Download references

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the my2cents development team: Tilmann Singer, Nadine Gahr, Yan Minagawa, Anton Rau, Mike Godenzi, Claudio Marforio, Stefan Hradetzky, and Felix von Reischach. We also want to thank the people behind Mirasense and codecheck.info for their support and the reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Auto-ID Labs, Chair of Information Management, ETH Zürich, Scheuchzerstrasse 7, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Stephan Karpischek, Florian Michahelles & Elgar Fleisch

  2. Chair of Operations Management, Institute of Technology Management, University of St. Gallen, Dufourstrasse 40a, 9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Elgar Fleisch

Authors
  1. Stephan Karpischek
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Florian Michahelles
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Elgar Fleisch
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stephan Karpischek.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Karpischek, S., Michahelles, F. & Fleisch, E. my2cents: enabling research on consumer-product interaction. Pers Ubiquit Comput 16, 613–622 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0426-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0426-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation