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submitted using mobile phones.
In the next section, a review is made on a num-
ber of existing price comparison applications glob-
ally as well as locally (in Malaysia). In section 3,
the overview of our proposed solution, which is a
model for crowdsourcing information on prices of
items from users through their mobile devices, is
explained. In section 4, analysis results of an ex-
ploratory survey done to determine the potential ap-
plication of mobile crowdsourcing in the construction
of the LoPrice model is presented. Finally, section 5
concludes the paper.
2 CURRENT APPROACH
Traditionally, price comparison of items was done by
going to each store, which was time consuming and
taxing. It could also be done by browsing promo-
tional pamphlets sent to mailboxes. However, com-
parison was difficult to be made this way because dif-
ferent pamphlets usually featured different items on
sale and not all stores provided the pamphlets. With
the advancement in the internet technology, stores
were seen to start having their online websites. Again,
not all items were featured on the websites and com-
parison of prices required users to surf from one web-
site to another. This had therefore lead to the develop-
ment of websites and applications that allowed com-
parison of prices from a number of different stores to
be made, which will be discussed next.
2.1 Price Comparison Applications
Many crowdsourcing applications have been devel-
oped as web-based and mobile, nine of which were
included in our review. These are CartCrunch
(CartCrunch, 2014), ShopSavvy (ShopSavvy, 2014),
Smoopa Shopping (Smoopa, 2014), Leclerc (Leclerc,
2014), ideola Price Comparison (Ideola, 2014),
Grocery King Shopping List (GroceryKing, 2014),
HuMuch (HuMuch, 2014), 1pengguna (KPDNKK,
2014) and Yellavia (Yellavia, 2014). Reasons for in-
clusion were
• these applications offer price comparison feature
• items under comparison include household items
CartCrunch is a location-dependent application. It
has the ability to scan information on items via an im-
age of a receipt. It has the feature that can find the
best prices of every item purchased on the receipt and
provides the store location information of the items.
Most of the mobile applications such as
CartCrunch, ShopSavvy, Smoopa Shopping, Leclerc
and ideola Price Comparison read bar code in order
to obtain items information easily. However, user
still needs to enter the price and store information of
each item. Leclerc is an application developed for the
Leclerc Company to ensure that this company always
provides the best price to its customers. Therefore, it
only works if the price of its own product is cheaper
than the other stores.
Meanwhile, Grocery King Shopping List (Gro-
ceryKing, 2014) is the only application that provides
sync feature that enables users to share or email their
shopping list with family and friends.
HuMuch (HuMuch, 2014), is an example of web-
based application that performs similar functionali-
ties. Since it is a web-based application, users need
to become a member in order to use it. However, we
are not able to explore HuMuch further as it does not
support locations outside the United States.
Particularly in Malaysia, two such web-based ap-
plications are found, Yellavia (Yellavia, 2014) and
1pengguna (KPDNKK, 2014). Our experience with
Yellavia found that the prices shown were outdated
by a year or more! 1pengguna is a portal developed
by the government of Malaysia to provide price in-
formation on 105 consumer products. Information
is provided by a group of agents, which are special
members appointed by the government to provide the
product details. These agents are supposed to update
the information daily before 2 p.m. However, there
is no mechanism to verify whether or not the price is
updated because the application only displays the cur-
rent date read from the system. Our experience using
the application also showed that the information on
prices of items were only available for a very limited
number of areas.
It is believed that one of the reasons that caused
the slow update of information is the fact that the
information came from only a few limited sources
(KPDNKK, 2014). However, as can be seen in the
case of (Yellavia, 2014), crowdsourcing alone is not
able to sustain regular and continuous incoming infor-
mation as users need personal computers or laptops to
access the web-based portals.
To address the problems above, we are proposing
the use of mobile crowdsourcing in the solicitation of
information on prices of items through the develop-
ment of the LoPrice model. With mobile crowdsourc-
ing, the task of entering information is done using
hand held mobile phones or devices through mobile
applications. This will expedite the information so-
licitation process and allows for immediate update of
information.
OnUsingMobileCrowdsourcingforTimelyInformationSolicitationandSharingofPrices
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