my2cents: enabling research on consumer-product interaction

Barcode scanners for smartphones enable mobile product-centric services for consumers. We have developed a mobile app that enables consumers to share their use of and opinions about products with their friends and others. Our goal is to establish a product-centric information stream generated by users to benefit other consumers and retail businesses and to enable large-scale research on consumer-product interaction. This paper describes our approach to create a sustainable service. We report first experiences and an initial evaluation after releasing the app to the public, give an overview over possible business models, and discuss some of the challenges we experienced during implementation.