I’ve just sent into live an update to the API service supporting Tesco Finder application. The focus has been on improving performance and accuracy of the service for the ever-increasing number of Tesco Finder users. The “nearest branches” feature is now much more accurate. Before the update, the API tended to favour nearest branches by longitude (east-west of your location) over latitude (north-south), resulting in branches further away but in an east-west direction ending u

It’s all very easy for us digital internet types to get sniffy about how TV advertising is old hat with its scatter-gun approach to marketing and no direct feedback that it works. I was in this mood when I chatted with Tesco.com’s marketing team on the eve of the first TV commercial for the iPhone Tesco Groceries scanning feature last Thursday. I have to say that they do tolerate me, do marketing. They just smiled and asked me to wait and see. The TV commercial has been airin

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’ve just accepted an update of Tesco Finder and now it crashes as soon as I start the app! Help! If you downloaded the Tesco Finder app in the past, then updated to the more recent version of the iPhone Operating System, then take our Tesco Finder app update, our updated app seems to crash on some customers’ phones. There seems to be a further clue: it is mostly affecting customers who have upgraded to version 4 of iOS but not yet further upgraded to v4.2.1 (the very late

The BBC’s Technology Correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, has written a nice blog article on the Tesco Groceries app now we have updated it to include barcode scanning. It’s always good when people I respect are enjoying the fruits of the work coming out of Tesco.com! http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/10/mobile_barcodes_and_smarter_sh.html #app #barcode #iphone #tescogroceries

Our Tesco Groceries for iPhone app has been updated to enable you to scan barcodes using the iPhone’s camera (the same way that Tesco Finder for iPhone does). Now you can scan any EAN barcode and, as long as the product is sold in your home store, you can see the product’s details and add it straight to your current shopping basket. This should really add to the convenience of grocery home shopping, so enjoy this new facility. To update the app, just launch App Store on your

It’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday, and my copy of Tweetdeck is on the screen displaying my favourite filtered Twitter feeds. As you can imagine I have a column filtering “tesco iphone app” and I have to admit I’m enjoying the very many positive comments coming from ‘the real world’. The team at Ribot are enjoying it too. Given that they designed and built the Tesco Groceries for iPhone app, their enjoyment at watching this very real feedback is even greater than mine (click he

A techfortesco reader has just alerted me to a very interesting article from a geography teacher’s blog that is introducing Tesco Finder for iPhone/iPod Touch into geography lessons as part of an earthquake survival kit. Chris Green, Head of Geography at a west midlands secondary school, has created the lessons to teach his pupils how to plan and execute a disaster preparedness kit on a fixed budget. http://geographyipods.blogspot.com/2010/09/earthquake-survival-kit-on-budget

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

Whilst most customers are having no issues with the Tesco Groceries app, we can see from a few iTunes feedback reviews that a few are not getting all their products or delivery slots. Unfortunately there is no way of getting hold of the the authors of those reviews (or even responding to them) to find out what’s up – and we just can’t recreate the issue here at all which is hugely frustrating if customers are having problems. Nobody has contacted our customer service centre a

Thanks to all of you who have downloaded our Tesco Groceries for iPhone application. The app is achieving a continuous top 10 position in iTunes for ‘most downloaded free app’ (it’s at No. 5 right now) and is No.1 in the ‘Lifestyle” category in the time period since it launched last Thursday. Of course downloads aren’t everything – we’ll be monitoring usage to see what customers use / avoid / love / hate about the application and tune it up appropriately. Feedback pretty good

A great question has come from @sitereport on Twitter: Can multiple iPhone users add items to the same order? Technically, as long as the users are logged in to the same account, then yes you can add to the same order (or change quantities or remove the item). Indeed, this can be a mix of anyone on the iPhone app, the Nokia app, and the web site – each keeps the others up to date. I say ‘technically’ because if someone checks out an order, the basket is emptied ready for the

Let’s take a walkthrough of the Tesco Groceries app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad (the latter running in “iPhone mode”). Here is the opening screen (when you first use the app, you will be asked to tap in your Tesco.com grocery login email and password). You can choose a delivery slot, and see when the next order is due (which you can amend if you wish): The Shopping List is your own memo pad, allowing you to type any product name in free-form text, perfect for remembering

Here it is: Tesco.com’s grocery heart and soul in a little app. This changes everything. Again. (“Again”, because we launched on Nokia first!) Tesco and Ribot present this powerful pocket of grocery home shopping to you now. We simply call it Tesco Groceries which says so much in so few words. Oh, the decisiveness of purpose, passion for excellence and focus of hard work by so many people for a year to give birth to this little bundle of joy, the love child of Tesco.com and R

Computer Weekly, one of my favourite reads, has as exceeded even their own excellent forecasting abilities. In their article Tesco Finder app reaches 1m downloads published yesterday, they reinterpreted my blog entry of Friday which spoke of the number of Tesco Finder requests reaching one million, rather than app downloads reaching one million. Given that Tesco Groceries for iPhone is about to launch, I thought I’d compile the actual total count of downloads of all the other

Our grocery home shopping application for Nokia phones (and soon, iPhone) was designed and built for us by a Brighton-based company called Ribot. But who are they? Brothers Antony and Jerome Ribot (that’s a French surname) came to our attention when we sent out a tender invitation to the world of mobile development companies. Many companies responded and we interviewed representatives of the most compelling responses to our invitation. All the companies we interviewed were pr

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

As you know, at Tesco.com we targeted iPhone first. Yet if I was to draw a Venn diagram containing two circles – one representing the population of Tesco online shoppers and the other the population of people with iPhones – you would see that the overlap between the two circles is only very small. However, if we created a third circle representing a phone that has a large overlap, we would find that it would be largely incapable of running anything. Our core online grocery sh

Yesterday evening I joined a panel of ‘thinkers’ at a session of Mobile Monday London, hosted at Microsoft’s Victoria offices in London. Chaired by Marek Pawlowski of MEX (the strategy forum for user experience), the session was entitled “Living in a Multi-platform World” and explored the challenges of developing for the much more fragmented world of mobile operating systems and hardware. I was joined by fellow panellists Oded Ran from Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 team, Tom H

I’m just back from one of my splendid ‘cycling and cider’ holidays in Cornwall – mountain biking through the fantastic trails set up around Calstock and Gunnislake in the day, delicious local cider procured from any one of a number of local cider farms in the evening (and it’s important to get it that way round). While I was away, Apple finished quality-assuring the latest version of Tesco Finder, which now supports barcode scanning through the iPhone’s camera. Management and