TicTap Blog

Woo hoo.. We’ve finally launched TicTap. TicTap is a price hunting service. It lets you hunt for product prices over the hand phone or through the web.

Information is provided by Amazon.com.

We’ll be rolling out new features and revisions very often and this blog will be the place to read about what we intend to do and how we did it.

Briefly, the TicTap mobile service allows you to send keywords to us using SMS. You will find this useful if you happen to be at the mall and want to see if Amazon.com sells something cheaper. The number to SMS is 763-807-3927. By the way, TicTap automatically remembers all your search requests so that when you come online later with your access code, you can review all your shopping items. So there’s no concern about forgetting what you looked for. (Note: TicTap mobile can only be used in the US.)

For best result if you are looking for books or CDs, use the ISBN or UPC code. For other products, please use descriptive words like brand names and model
numbers. TicTap will reply with the new and used prices.

Remember.. garbage in.. garbage out.. so use sensible choice of keywords.

The web search is our attempt to provide an alternative (and hopefully better) UI to Amazon.com’s web site. One nifty feature we have is the ability to send the price information of a product to a hand phone using SMS, right from your computer! So if mum wants to know if she can get her microwave oven cheaper at Amazon.com, just send the price info to her handphone.

There’s a lot more to what we offer, so go over to www.tictap.com to find out more.

Let Damon or me know what you think. We don’t have the resources of a Google or Amazon, so we strive harder to make it work for you!

Contact me at alexchoowk at tictap dot com. Damon’s at damon at tictap dot com.

We just updated TicTap today.

The most significant improvements were made to the user interface of TicTapWeb and the introduction of labels.

Among the UI improvements,

1. Saved searches.
2. You can search directly from the URL! Try http://www.tictap.com/s/lord of the rings to see what I mean.
3. We’ve color-coded the prices for faster navigation.
4. A permanent link URL is present for each product. Anyone can bookmark this link to get back to that product in future.
5. We’re offering customer reviews.

By the way, we’ve made it really simple to search for products by authors, artistes, and songs! But we thought it’d be fun if we let people discover it by themselves. (Clue: It’s not a link).

We’ve also introduced registration. It’s a simple 2 step process. And once you are registered, you can use labels.

Think of labels as your personalised shopping lists. You can create and modify as many as you like, and even give it colors for easy reference. You can share any label with friends by giving them the direct URL to that label.

Of course, we’re nowhere satisfied with the finished product. Damon is working on a super cool feature and I’m working on tighter integration with TicTap Mobile.

Let us know what you think and how we can do better.

We made some changes to the way customer reviews are presented today.

Now, you will see a list of words at the top of each reviews page. These words are typical words that you’d use to describe a product. For example, ‘Excellent, great, highly recommended, lousy, waste of money, fair, average’ etc…

If you have a better idea to summarise customer reviews, let us know.

It’s not uncommon for me to misspell words.

Really, how many of us can spell the California Governor’s last name correctly?

That is why TicTap has a new ‘Did You Mean’ feature. When it detects a possible spelling error it will offer an alternative.

For example, try Arnold Scwarseneger.

Using TicTap, you can now search by authors, singers, songs, actors and directors.

Simply type in their names!

Alternatively, you can type “author:Stephen King” in the search box.

Here are all the keywords to use:

1. author:
2. song:
3. singer:
4. actor:
5. actress:
6. director:

You can also use the keyword “artiste:” as a substitute for actor, actress, singer and director.

This works even from the url. For example try http://www.tictap.com/s/actress:meryl streep here.

Damon and I have been talking about the look and feel of TicTap.

While we like to keep it simple and clean, we think it might look a little more professional.

However, we’re not web designers, and although the site was (painstakingly!)created with a text editor, it might be time to get outside help.

So let us hear from you what ought to be done with the design of TicTap. Tell us what works for you and what doesn’t.

Drop us a note here.

Now, whenever you search for something, we will give you other search terms that are related to it.

For example, try searching for madonna. A ‘Related searches’ link appears under the search box. Just move your mouse over it to see what happens.

One thing - the related searches may not yield you anything useful within TicTap, but we felt that the Yahoo! search may get you what you want.

For another example, try Steven King.

We hope this feature adds more value to you.

A user wrote in to say that it’s often hard to remember what Asin and ISBN numbers mean in the saved search history.

Therefore, we have tweaked this feature a little, so that you can see the product name beside the Asin or ISBN number in future. Let’s hope this improves usability.

We’ve added 2 nifty features for music lovers.

When you click view “Music Tracks”, we’ll provide a link to the page at Amazon.com so that you can find song samples from that album.

In addition, we’ve added song title links to Yahoo! that searches for lyrics.

Give it a try with this example - Norah Jones albums.

One feature of TicTapWeb that I use very often is the labels feature.

Unfortunately, many users do not use it and I was wonderig why.. turned out we did a really hopeless job of telling people about it. So in this post, I will try to explan what labels are and why you should use it.

Think of labels as your shopping lists. Think of it as Amazon.com’s wishlist, and you can create as many as you want, color-code it, share it, and name it anything.

In order to use labels, you need to register. It’s a painless process, and doesn’t ask for more information that we need to get you signed in.

Once you sign in, you will see a “Add to shopping label” drop down list on the right side of every product. That’s where you add the item to a default list of labels we have created for you.

Don’t worry if you don’t like them. Just click on the Personal Space link and you can modify them, remove them and even change the colors.

You can insert a product into as many labels as you have. By default, each label is given a ‘Public’ status, which means you can share with friends. To share, just give them the URL of the label. All your labels are presented under the heading My Labels in your Personal Space.

This is a label I created for things I want to get my younger brother.

Labels are a very easy and convenient way to make sure you never forget the items you want.

Give it a go!