We’ve touched on mobile web development in the past couple of posts. It’s an exciting new area which offers a huge potential for growth as more people get online with their mobile phones. Well rather than just talk about it, we thought we’d give it a go, and Pricecheck.at is the result.

Imagine the scenario…

You’re on your way back from work when you happen to walk past a window with a big sign that says, ‘Sale today only! Nintendo Wii Console just £190!’. The shop is closing in 20 minutes so you don’t have chance to get home and check the latest prices available online. Luckily you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, so you quickly call up pricecheck.at, enter ‘Nintendo Wii Console’, and with the single click of a button you get a list of prices for the Nintendo Wii, and where it’s available online. It’s a good job you did too, as it turns out that you can in fact get a brand new console online from game.co.uk for just £179.99.

You are in PC World and you want to buy a brand new digital camera. You’d checked prices on the Internet before you left, but the sales assistant recommends a model you hadn’t considered. You think it seems perfect, but you don’t want to buy it from the first place you find, and would rather check the price available online first. The problem is PC World is about 10 miles from your house, so going home first is a bit of a mission, especially with the price of petrol these days. So you call up pricecheck.at, enter ‘Canon IXUS 75 Digital Camera’ and click ‘Check Price’. You’re then presented with 12 different prices for where the same model is available online. As it happens the price available from PC World is the same as the cheapest price available elsewhere, in this case either Curry’s or Amazon Marketplace, all three offering the camera for £129.99. But had you been in Jessops this service would have been invaluable, as they list the camera for £159. So you would have saved yourself £30 + a lot of trouble finding out.

People have been benefiting from price comparision services on their PC’s for years, with sites such as Kelkoo and Pricerunner becoming incredibly popular, but the Pricecheck.at service packages up all this functionality and makes it available to users on their mobile phones when they are actually out and about shopping in the real world as a last check to do before buying anything in a shop.

Another great example of when the Pricecheck service could really come into it’s own is in the huge market of mobile phones themselves!

A friend of mine just got stung when he mistakenly signed up for an 18 month mobile phone contract which it turned out he didn’t want. Despite taking the phone back to the shop just 3 hours after he bought it, they wouldn’t let him get out of his contract and he was completely committed to paying off the 18 months contract! There is apparently NO cooling off period when buying a mobile phone in store which I was very surprised about… However this makes a service like Pricecheck.at incredibly useful.

A quick search on Pricecheck.at for the ‘Sony ericsson K850i on the O2 Network’ reveals an incredible 163 prices, with mobiles.co.uk being the cheapest at just £15! Now presumably this is a contract arrangement, but still it gives you a good indication of what’s available online, and may just stop you signing up to a cast iron instore contract, when you can get it cheaper online.

These are just a few of the scenarios that sprung to mind, but I’m sure there are plenty of other situations where being able to access a price comparision service, while on the move, could prove to be immensely useful.

Pricecheck.at also offers a mobile friendly web directory, which is a list of sites that are particularly aimed at working well on mobile devices. You’d be surprised how much on the Internet simply isn’t accessible from a mobile device. You can also browse the site for products and prices.

The site is currently just a basic service, but if it proves popular we plan to expand and improve the browsing and shopping service to make it more user friendly and useful for mobile shoppers. It’s a tricky balancing act between attractive design, and accessibility on as wide a range of platforms as possible.

I’d welcome any feedback or comments about the site and the ethos behind it. Also if you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, let me know how Pricecheck.at looks on your phone.

Hands up who’s heard of social bookmarking. I expect most people reading this article will have. The concept has been around for an Internet ‘eternity’ now. I thought everyone in the Facebook generation would be familiar with the idea, but I was speaking to a friend of mine yesterday, happily telling them about NBS and explaining how we’ve incorporated a ’social bookmark’ scoring system that’s a bit like ‘Digg for shopping’, and they were like “Dig what!?…”.

Sometimes I think we in the Internet business are in danger of losing touch with the vast majority of people that actually use the Internet… Our target audience… We get caught up in our own little worlds of digging, backing and blogging and forget what it’s all about in the first place.

And if you’re involved in the more technical aspects of website building like I am, you’re in even more danger of getting removed from reality as you have to compete with the ever changing platform on which you’re developing. (ajax, jQuery, browser standards, APIs, blah blah blah).

So just remember, when building a site don’t lose touch with the original purpose. Get an opinion from anyone willing to offer one. If someone says, “don’t ask me I’m hopeless on the Internet”, that’s exactly who you should be asking. If you can persuade them you’ve got a great idea, then everyone else should be a piece of cake.

The Internet is just so big, sometimes it’s hard to know where to start when you are looking for inspiration or new ideas. Google is an obvious place, but only if you know what you’re looking for. It’s a great tool for locating information, but what if you just want to browse and learn something interesting but you’re not quite sure what… Well that’s where sites like Digg.com come in. If you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it then social bookmarking sites can give you an up to date buzz, news and articles to inspire. There are plenty of other sources of inspiration of course, here’s my top list.

1. Social bookmarking sites, digg.com, technorati et al.
2. Forums - Can be a great place to meet new people, discuss topics or get help. However they are often full of rubbish and finding genuinely useful information can be a mission. There are nuggets of information there if you have the time to find them.
3. Blogs - I love reading people’s blogs and keep meaning to make a list of blogs I like when I find them, but I all too often forget. If you find a good blog you can often get far better constructed thoughts and articles.
4. News sites - I occassionally read the bbc website, also the register has up to date articles.
5. Stumble Upon - You could group this together with the social bookmarking sites above, but I actually think it’s a little different, and really very clever!
6. Facebook - A great way to waste time… Enough said
7. Read a newspaper - Ok it’s not online, but I think that’s a good thing. Unplug for a while, put your feet up with a coffee and chill.

Any ideas please let me know!