New price comparison app PricePinz one of the fastest and easiest to use

PricePinz is a free price comparison iPhone app that launched recently. Developed by a Singapore-based company, it joins a growing number of apps like Save22 (formerly LobangClub) eBay’s RedLaser, Amazon’s PriceCheck, and ShopSavvy, among others.

Since its debut a few days ago, PricePinz has been downloaded over 100 times. It currently offers over 4,000 items in its pricing database — the information is gathered mostly from merchants and in-house data entry.

PricePinz boasts support for both barcode and QR Code scanning, and provides a list of deals available in the vicinity of the user. It leverages social network to allow users to help promote their favorite deal and rate or rank a retailers’ offering based on criteria like customer support, freebies, and after sales service.

Unlike its more established competitors, PricePinz doesn’t have voice and picture-based inputs. Neither does it allow users to order directly with a ‘Buy Now’ button. However, in a random test at a Courts furniture store in Singapore (right), I find its barcode scanner to be one of the fastest and easiest to use among existing price shopping comparison apps.

Read: Six price scanning apps compared: Save22, PricePinz, PriceCheck, Redlaser, Shopsavvy, Google Shopper

How it started

Karim Harmouche and Kevin Straszburger first met while playing football in Singapore. Little did they know that two years later they would team up with Tony Boatman and create PricePinz.

The idea first came to Karim when he was buying a gift for his brother in Lebanon. His bad shopping experience sparked the thought that he could develop an app that leverages on the growing base of smartphone subscribers to improve the situation. The end-result is a SOLOMO (social, mobile and location based) app is all the rage ever since it was popularized by KPCB.

So using Ruby on Rails and a virtual team of developers, the founders chose to concentrate first on the electronics category with future plans of branching out to cover other goods like apparel, cosmetics and groceries.

Their goal is to be the installed in at least 33% of smartphones in Southeast Asia with a product base of no less than 20,000 products. In their pursuit to be the numero uno shopping tool in Southeast Asia, they are already in touch with some big retailers in Malaysia with plans of operating eventually in all of Southeast Asia.

Future hopes

Most of the improvements to PricePinz will come from its user base. Kevin makes it a point to monitor its Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr accounts to source for product innovation ideas.