Have access to up-to-date prices of products and services to be smarter consumers

1. Price It
Have access to up-to-date
prices of products and
services to be smarter
consumers
Micro-workers supply the
latest price information

2. Problem

How to have access / find the most up-to-date
prices for products and services in developing
countries?

Food

Gas

Car repair

Hair dresser

etc

3. Problem

No place to go to find price information in
developing countries

People want to be smarter and educated shoppers

Why should a consumer buy things / pay for services at a
higher price than they are?

Prices are not stable and the person in the middle is
taking advantage

Difficult to conduct extensive research on prices

Who can do the research? How long will it take? How
much will it cost?

Discussion forums on deals and coupons are rare

4. Solution: Price It
• Micro-workers submit the latest price
information
• Price It is a price query system that allows
shoppers or companies to find up-to-date and
real-time prices of products and services
• Prices are accessible through the web, mobile
apps (different platforms), SMS and Voice to
reach a wide audience

5. Advantages
• Users can find reliable price information quickly
• Shoppers can find best prices and avoid getting
overcharged
• Companies can conduct basic price research on
the ground easily without setting up an
infrastructure
• Micro-workers can participate easily via SMS
on their feature phones
• No need for an app through a smartphone, though
an app front-end can be easily made to support the
system

6. How It Works
Example: Price of Fish
Location, Subscription
type of Date: 3/3/2012
possible
products /
services
Query: pharmais the
Query: What dakar
price of tuna in Dakar?
Micro-workers Users /
Server Companies
Pharma X in Dakar is Answer: X is open from
open from 8 am Price of
Submission - to 11 8 Answer: The average
am to 11 pm on
pm on -Sunday
fish Tuna price of tuna is $5 in
Sunday 3/3/2012
3/3/2012 Dakar on 3/3/2012
Lowest
SMS Web, mobile Average
app, SMS or Highest
Voice Price

7. How It Works: Users
• Users submit price queries of products or services
via web, mobile apps, SMS or using voice
• Prices are organized by categories and locations at
different levels of granularity (neighborhood, city,
country)
• On the web and in the mobile app prices are mapped
to increase visibility and graphs are accessible for
specific periods of time
• Users can send one-time queries or subscribe to
receive regular prices by SMS / Voice
Checking the reliability of
Stable and Empowered data by calling users and
lower prices consumers sending alerts through
apps and the web

8. How It Works: Micro-workers
• Micro-workers opt in to become reporters
• They select categories of products / services and
locations they want to cover
• Selections are validated or some are proposed
• Micro-workers send daily prices and receive
payments by SMS
• Some micro-workers receive regular requests
for price submissions to cross-check the
reliability of the submitted prices
Small payments Checking the reliability
to improve live of data with cross-
submissions

9. Revenue Model
• Premium SMS / Voice for users (one-time
queries) and subscriptions
• Sponsored advertising in SMS / Voice
• For each SMS received on the network, the operators
generally allow 2 SMS to be sent back
• Sponsored campaigns
• E.g., save energy, how to pay less for your phone bill
• Web site with advertising and premium service to
access to more specific data
• Selling the data and base of users to consumer
associations, market research firms, government
agencies etc (with respect of privacy)

10. What we did already?
• The presented idea extends on an app we
developed
• We developed an app called Yaboy that
crowdsources the price of fish in Senegal
• Micro-work has the potential to make this idea
successful
http://youtu.be/2VrkPJz3gkI