The mobile team who created the sumptuous Tesco Recipes for iPad application have just informed me that the new version has gone live on Apple’s iTunes App Store. If you have already downloaded this free iPad app before then you’ll be prompted to update the application when you enter the App store and look at ‘updates’. You’ll recall me being a big fan of this app – partly because of the wonderful photography and partly because it allows me to shop grocery products online tha

If you’re an Emmerdale fan than you will no doubt have seen the excellent and amusing 40-second TV commercial from our marketing department. The commercial shows our “Tesco family” using the barcode scanning facility on their iPhone as they go about life. You’ll see the ad popping up all over the place on commercial TV channels in the UK over the next four weeks. If you haven’t spotted the commercial yet, don’t worry: I watched Emmerdale on your behalf and recorded the commer

I don’t get any products, favourites or delivery slots when I use my iPhone or Nokia app – what’s wrong? If you get this problem, it means is that your grocery account is set to an ‘accessiblity’ profile. In order to make your account work with the app it needs to be displayed in ‘standard’ profile. Changing your profile is easy but you do need to go to our web site and make a change to one of the settings. Follow these instructions: Login to your grocery account at http://ww

I’ve just been informed within the last 10 minutes that our Nokia grocery home shopping application for Nokia S60-series phones is now live for download by customers from the Nokia OVI store. If you have a Nokia phone model 800, N97, N97 mini, X6, 5230 or 5530 then you’re all set: Download and enjoy! #ovi #nokia #grocery #app #tesco

I have lots of interesting feedback from readers wondering why we we went for Nokia first and (as GoMo News put it, “Tesco snubs iPhone with mobile commerce application”). First of all we actually haven’t snubbed iPhone. Ribot have built grocery apps for both Nokia and iPhone and we’re just finishing user-acceptance testing of the iPhone version which will give you a similar experience to the walkthrough I posted yesterday. You know me by now – I love iPhone! But it’s not abo

Let’s take a walk-through of our new grocery home shopping application for Nokia phones to give you a sense of what it looks like and how it works. We start with the opening screen, which enables you to reserve a delivery slot for your order (or change it for a pending order). It also allows you to type in generic grocery product names as a shopping reminder. You can use the shopping list as just that – a list to shop in-store (any store not just Tesco) if you wish: tap the b

Last night we submitted our most ambitious mobile application yet to Nokia’s OVI app store. It’s a simple but complete grocery home application which allows you to search for products and add them to your online basket. It has full access to your favourites and all special offers so you can shop for groceries on the move. You can even amend an order that is checked-out awaiting delivery in order to add to (or alter) the basket or delivery slot. The app is synchronised with yo

Last week our grocery home shopping competitor Ocado won the BT Retail Week Technology Award for their iPhone and Android Ocado on the Go apps. The two applications are excellent examples of applying technology appropriately for the customer’s benefit – making the process of grocery shopping easier and more convenient. I’m sure our forthcoming grocery apps will be worthy competition. Indeed if we can even do half as well as Ocado’s claim that 5% of orders are made through the

I like this ‘thought piece’ from Revolution magazine on APIs and the future. http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/news/947967/open-source-answer/ The article’s “pros and cons” paragraph is particularly interesting, and the section about the importance of ‘abstracting’ the API from how the underlying service really works was important to me when designing the Tesco.com Grocery API. Our underlying grocery service is a complex system with many components, and if I enabled it fully

I thought we should let you know that our leadership team have asked us to look into creating an iPhone application of our own. Since TJAM, they have been really excited by the ideas and opportunities that have arisen and feel that we should also give our internal developers the opportunity to learn how to program for the iPhone. We haven’t taken this decision lightly now that we are fostering a developer community and we would still welcome some healthy competition from you