eBay announced today that it has acquired RedLaser and related technology from Occipital. With over two million downloads, RedLaser is the top-selling iPhone barcode-scanning application for comparison shopping and product information using a mobile device. According to the announcement, eBay plans to integrate RedLaser’s accurate barcode-scanning technology into its leading iPhone apps including the eBay, Selling, StubHub and Shopping.com applications.
eBay intends to offer RedLaser as a free, standalone application – now available here. With the acquisition, eBay expects that RedLaser users will see an increase in selection as eBay integrates more than 200 million listings from the online marketplace and product inventory from over 7,000 global merchants on Shopping.com (including 95 of the top 100 online retailers).
Anecdotally, I joined a couple of our PR folks a few weeks ago and sat down with Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) to talk about eBay DEVCON 2010 and the conversation obviously turned to talk of what the future holds for online commerce in general. Scoble went so far as to say “you guys should acquire RedLaser…” to which we all nodded and acknowledged that we leave those decisions to the corporate development team. Good call Scoble. Good call.
It seems like every other blog post I write is related to mobile… and that’s a good thing. I’m genuinely excited to see the momentum that eBay has taken with regard to mobile commerce. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, when discussing the unveiling of the iPhone4 earlier this month, even used a quote from eBay CEO, John Donahoe, to emphasize the impact of iPhone/iPad applications on present day consumer habits…
eBay’s mobile apps are available to millions of iPhone, Blackberry and Android users in more than 190 countries and 8 languages.
I’ll leave you with this stat… a mobile purchase is made every 2 seconds via eBay’s mobile applications.
Cheers,
RBH
