* A bargain hunting mobile application
The mobile services market is, to say the least, insanely hot. What with the multibillion-dollar ring tone market as hot as ever (I must confess I would never have expected that there would be such an insanely huge market for ring tones at $2.99 for 30 seconds of music) and what seems like an endless torrent of mobile social networking services you might wonder if the mobile market is all expense and no return for consumers.
Here’s a mobile service that, as time goes on, will definitely give customers a real return for running it: Mobio’s Cheap Gas.
Cheap Gas is an application in Mobio’s Lifestyle Portal, a collection of 50 applications organized into collections.
These collections include “Stepping Out” (entertainment), “Chilling Out” (shopping, spas, beauty treatments, health/fitness), “Date Night,” “Panic Kit” (emergency services), “Out with the kids,” and the oddest one for the U.S. market (I am not making this up) “”Cricket Center” – described as “for cricket lovers who want to get live scores right on their mobile phone” (even though I am British, cricket is a sport that I just don’t get).
All of these applications are locality oriented – in other words, they provide information related to where you are so, for example, if you want to buy tickets for a movie at your local theater then using the Mobile Movie Times application you can do so.
The unique application in this collection is Cheap Gas which helps you to find the cheapest gas nearest to wherever you happen to be. You can even set up locations you frequent such as your home, office, and gym where you tend to need gas.
Cheap Gas also allows you to locate the lowest cost gas by brand (if such a thing matters to you), and the company claims over 150,000 price spotters and over 350,000 updated prices per week.
Cheap Gas is, I suspect, one of the first in a wave of bargain hunting mobile applications that are going to transform the retail market.
While finding the cheapest anything is the obvious application, the next step will be to help people find specific and even relatively rare things. Want to find out where you can buy truffles in Tulsa or duck proscuitto in Dallas? That’s where mobile services will score big, and Cheap Gas shows perhaps the most obvious and big scale implementation I’ve seen to date.
Mobio is in open beta, runs on a large number of cell phones that run Java including models from HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Sanyo, and Sony Ericsson, and, for now, the application suite is completely free.
