Developed by the guys at Big In Japan, ShopSavvy is an app that allows you to use your device as a portable barcode scanner. You point your phone’s camera at any barcode and it will read it, do a product look up, and give you information about the product, as well as where you can find it online or at nearby stores and for how much. Obviously, something like this is a window shopper’s dream.

And while you might think retailers may hate something like this, because it gives shoppers all of their competitors’ information, increasingly, they’ve been working with ShopSavvy to come up with ways to allow you to make buying in their stores even easier. And honestly, what are the retailers going to do anyway? All of this information is out there on the web, ShopSavvy just gives you easy access to it. Are they going to ban mobile phones in their stores? That’d be a great story for us if that were to happen.

So what took so long? Well, for a while, the iPhone lacked a key feature needed for the barcode scanner: A camera that had auto-focus. The iPhone 3GS gained that, and so the team should have been good to go. The plan was originally to release the app this summer, but a internal mix up involving a team member who had since departed registering the app to his iTunes account caused a delay (more on that here). After some back and forth with Apple, Big In Japan was finally able to get that resolved.

While it’s great to see this product on the iPhone, it is a little buggy right now. The main issue is that it’s hard to scan the barcodes properly. Big In Japan says a fix for that is coming shortly, based on what they’ve learned from beta testers, but keep that in mind when using the app for now.

My own tests confirm that it is a little hard to scan, but it seems to work most of the time. For example, I just scanned the protein bar I’m eating, and ShopSavvy pulled it up right away and gave me a pricing rundown. Nifty.

ShopSavvy is available for free in the App Store. Find it here. Also read about Big In Japan’s other big plan for the iPhone (100 apps in a year) here.

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The company has set a goal to release 100 apps before the end of 2010 for the iPhone. How are they going to do this? By pulling together a bunch of developers from around the U.S. to make an app development power house. Currently, the team has assembled 25 developers and 25 user interface guys to work towards the goal. The team members mix and match, pairing up to do one app at a time. When they complete that one, it’s on to the next one, with a new set of partners.

The concept is actually much more straightforward than pulling new app ideas out of the blue and making them. The reason Big in Japan decided to do this was because they were being approached by so many brands and companies to help them build iPhone apps, that there was no way Big in Japan could keep up with the demand the way the team was previously structured. So now, when a new app request comes in, Big in Japan looks it over, decides if they think its a good fit for their large team to do, and then pass it along to the app developers.

And it’s a good deal for the developers because they are all working together towards a common goal: Money. The way the model works is that this pool of developers collectively own half of the company (which is a sub-division of Big in Japan). As such, they get half of the revenue from the company to split up between them. So the better each of them do, the better they all do. And it’s based on a country club model, Big in Japan co-founder Alexander Muse tells us. Basically, these developers buy their seat, but if they decide they want to move on, they can sell it to someone else.

Muse expects that 25 apps will be launched this quarter from the project. And he hopes to continue that pace through the end of 2010. Realistically, he admit that maybe only 80 or so apps will actually be available when all is said and done in the App Store. He, like everyone else, realizes that it can be tricky to get apps approved at times by Apple, and he suspects that some developers will get fed up and simply stop working on those apps. Still, 80 apps in a year from one house would be very impressive.

Big in Japan made a name for itself with its ShopSavvy application, which won the Android Developer Challenge last year. ShopSavvy still has yet to launch for the iPhone, but Muse recently wrote that it will be launching very soon.

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ShopSavvy, which was one of the original Google Android Challenge winners when it was still known as GoCart, launched with the Android platform last October and has been one of the most popular applications on the device since then. The company claims it now can compare over 20 million products at over 22,000 retailers.

Here are the full list of enhancements the company is claiming with this release:

* More than 1,000 additional participating retailers
* More than 750,000 additional scannable products
* Faster barcode scanning
* Faster, more accurate product search
* Faster load times
* Faster animations
* WiFi and GPS setting retention
* Notification of whether or not an item is in stock or out of stock
* Improved battery life
* Optional registration
* Option to search by title if product is not found
* Google Product Search integration
* Ability to visit retailer Web sites inside or outside ShopSavvy
* Additional polish to user interface

The company has yet to launch an iPhone version of ShopSavvy, a lot of that had to do with the iPhone’s current junky camera that can’t do things like auto-focus. But as we all learned yesterday, that’s about to change. And Big In Japan has been working on an iPhone version for some time.

The concept of using a mobile device to scan barcodes is an interesting one. Others apps in this space have since risen up, and pretty much anyone make their own simple barcode scanner using the Android Scripting Environment. The other day we covered Googler Matt Cutts using a barcode scanner to scan books into the Google Book Search database, but a couple days later, he and some fellow Googlers actually came up with a way to do the same thing with the Android phone.

You can find the new version of ShopSavvy in the Android Market, or download it directly here.

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Since most of you don’t have an Android G1 phone, we are featuring some video reviews from the AppVee crew to show you what you are missing (or not, depending on your point of view). You can watch the first ten video reviews in an earlier post. Below are five more, two of which are on my top ten (ShopSavvy and iSkoot for Skype).

One of the most potentially useful set of apps on Android turn the phone into a barcode scanner and let you compare prices on the go. In fact, there are two apps that do this, ShopSavvy and CompareEverywhere. They are currently the No. 2 and No. 4 apps on the Android Market, respectively. Both look through the phone’s camera lens to scan a product’s barcode and look it up in a database to retrieve price comparisons from both the Web and local stores.

I tried both with half a dozen packaged foods in my pantry (a can of tomato sauce, a jar of salsa, chicken stock, Nutella, some English muffins, a jar of baby food). This is far from a scientific sample, but CompareEverywhere did a much better job identifying the products. It identified 4 out of 6, whereas Shop Savvy was only able to identify two. CompareEverywhere, however, sometimes got stuck and was not able to capture the barcode, especially for products where the label was not completely flat. I found ShopSavvy to sometimes be to quick on the trigger tryin to capture the barcode beoire it was really in focus.

Both services obviously need to improve their underlying product databases, but they are still worth downloading and will no doubt improve over time. Here are AppVee’s reviews of each:

CompareEverywhere

ShopSavvy

iSkoot for Skype is a mobile Skype client that turns your Android into a Skype phone. It lets you make Internet phone calls over Skype and IM your Skype contacts. Skype calls go over the data network (WiFi or 3G, whichever is available). It is a must-download for anyone who uses Skype frequently.

iSkoot For Skype

Bluebrush is a drawing app that lets you make doodles on your Android. The screen is too small to make anything other than squiggles, in my experience, but the app includes a fun social component that lets you draw with others using the Bluebrush on their Android phones.

Bluebrush

For people who want to make their own shortcuts to their favorite apps, Any Cut goes beyond the customization options that come with the phone itself.

Any Cut

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These are the same people who open sourced SimpleTicket, the open source trouble ticketing tool. The company’s award winning Podserve podcasting system will remain proprietary. It’s great that Big in Japan is going to continue supporting these free, hosted tools – the RSS to IM tool alone quickly grew to 30,000 users and that can be quite a burden for a non revenue generating service.

Here’s a list of the tools that are being offered to the community. Many non-developers will find these useful too. These are the kinds of tools that make RSS so great, it makes information very pliable.

ElfURL – A URL shortcut creator like TinyURL, but if you like you can tag your shortcuts for search engine indexing and get an RSS feed tracking the number of click-throughs for each ElfURL. I use ElfURL several times a day.

FrankenFeed – An RSS feed splicer. You provide multiple RSS feeds and this service combines them into one. Add tags and descriptions for sharing and indexing. I prefer FeedRinse (to add filters at any time) or Lazy Tom’s FeedJumbler because I’m more familiar with it, but making this open source could lead to some interesting developments. It could also be nice for many reasons to have on your own domain. When it comes to using 3rd party feed splicing apps, it’s also fun to run the new feed through FeedBurner so you can tell how many subscribers the feed has. I did that some time ago with the NPTech Tag metafeed for nonprofit technologists.

Instantfeed- An RSS to IM alert system. Very basic and there are better tools available, but three cheers for this one being open sourced.

SocialMail – Email to RSS conversion tool. Very nice for getting Email newsletters and other old school communication delivered by RSS. There are a number of other options available around the web, but they tend to be fly by night and this is a lightweight service you don’t want collapsing mid-use. I’d love to see filtering added to this, as it is though you can easily combine it with FeedRinse.

FeedVault – An OPML file backup system, to store the list of feeds you are subscribed to in case your computer crashes, your online feed reader melts, etc. A very nice idea, not as much fun as ShareYourOPML or OPMLSearch.com, but does include tags and descriptions. I’m still convinced that OPML is loads of fun and is going to take off someday.

QwikPing – This one is boring, but maybe someone will be able to do something interesting with it. Good luck dealing with spammers if it’s anything public, of course.

All in all, that’s a pretty good list of tools. It only makes sense that they never proved viable for one company to maintain, none of them were revenue generating. They could, though, prove very useful in a suite of services that other companies and consultants offer their clients. I’d love to see some of them continue being developed.

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As I see it there are three important features of note.

First, PodServe is a place where podcasters can host their podcasts for free. You simply create a channel and all of your podcasts are included. Brian interviewed me today (he’s an up an coming podcaster himself) – you can see the podcast interviews of me and others on his page here. As a podcaster, you can use this page as your main site, or you can simply point to the individual files in your own blog and they will be included as enclosures. Not only is this service free, but PodServe is also providing a RSS feed for the page (which you can use or not), and PodServe will also provide statistics and other tools to assist the publisher. Comments/reviews are also enabled on each site.

If you are a podcaster looking for a free place to host your files, PodServe is an excellent choice.

Second, PodServe also allows “social podcasts”. A channel can be created that allows a number of podcasters to submit files, and all will be included in the feed.

The third notable feature is really interesting. Users can create full public podcast channels that anyone can add their content to. Two great examples are Brian’s Naked Conversations Discussion (podcasts discussing Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s new book) and Alexander Muse’s Elevator Pitch Podcast, which is a podcast that any company can use to submit an elevator pitch. I’m considering using the service to create something similar to the Elevator Pitch Podcast for use by TechCrunch readers.

PodServe is just one product in a large new project called Big in Japan. Brian has been working on Big in Japan, along with Alexander Muse, for a long time now, and they are preparing to launch a number of the new products, including PodServe, at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin next week. If the other products are as interesting as PodServe, Big in Japan is going to be, well, big.

Note: This is the second post I’ve done with my new MacBook Pro, and it just keeps getting better. I’m seriously impressed with this machine. Macs are really, really cool.