One of the odd things about being a mobile veteran is that you see new services arrive and think:
“Hmm dear old Brewster tried that back in 2000 with Digertyboo. It didn’t work then either. He’s dead you know.”
This was the kind of sentiment I felt when I read about AskRav.
AskRav is an sms price comparison service.
AskRav.com allows users to text the name or code of a product into their mobile phone, send it via SMS to 60066 ie “ask ipod video”, and receive an instant response on the best three prices for that product available over the internet through the AskRav.com site. This includes the name of the online or high street retailer with the best price.
“Hmm… dear old Jon and Robert tried that back in 2000 with Scan. It didn’t work then either.” Although I’m happy to report that they’re not dead - one took his mobile expertise to New Zealand and the other become a stand up comedian. Honestly.
I’ve written before about Scan (not to confused with the US ScanBuy) and at length why these services don’t normally work as well as they sound as if they should intuitively.
There is, in fairness, a little more to AskRav like ‘Today’s Hot Deals’ which seeks to recruit and engage with a community of deal finders. Deals are rated by other users giving points and the best deal finder gets a pressie each month and the kudos associated with winning.
Plus they say that they have detailed specs of thousands of gadgets on their site, which is a nice, easy-to-use and clean.
Sometimes there’s nothing essnetially wrong with an idea itself - it’s just that the timing is wrong and it fails. That could be what went wrong with Scan and could be why AskRav’s time has come. It does have a lot going for it as a poential gadget knowledge centre and I’m sure I’ll use it to research stuff I want to buy. But like most people, I strongly suspect that I won’t be using their sms comparison service, so I hope that’s not their business model.
Whilst I am, it’s true to say, a regular performer on the UK stand-up comedy circuit, I also work for a leading mobile network operator. I guess you might call that a double-play…
For the avoidance of doubt, it was neither creating a start-up that didn’t survive (although some of its best applications did - see Argos’ mobile portfolio for examples of real world mobile shopping turning over large amounts of money) nor working for an MNO that motivated me to become a comic.
No, that was my fault.
I actually used the SMS service over the weekend when I was shopping for a DVD Recorder - it wasnt bad in the sense that I realised how much I could have potentially got ripped off for in a shop on tottenham court road - plus the expression on the shop-keepers face was priceless when I showed him the text … “Oh great another company trying to eat away at my margins”… was what he was probably thinking.. haha