Dec2009 iPhone Apps - Pick 3

On November 19, I surprised my wife with the iPhone 3GS for her birthday and earned serious brownie points as it was least expected. As a result of that, I have started to use it frequently (and helping her with apps) and decided to pick 3 of my favorite apps every month and share it with you. They are in no specific order and are productivity apps that I have personally used and benefited from.

1. Pic2Shop: In the spirit of the holiday season and finding the best shopping deals, this free app as come in handy for me. On a recent shopping spree, we were looking for the Rocky DVD series and used Pic2shop to scan the barcode and the app instantly came back and gave us the website(s) and one of which saved us $10 on the set. So, sorry Best buy, we had to order it online.

The example below shows the Snow White and Seven Dwarfs Premium Video set:

2. Coupon Sherpa: Another one that will help you maximize your shopping dollars by finding the coupons for your favorite stores this holiday season. It also is GPS aware so will show you the closest stores and the respective coupons. You can browse by category and save coupons to favorites. This worked most of the time but didn't find a couple of stores including Toys R Us unless there were no coupons available for them which is hard to believe during the holiday season. It did find my daughter's favorite store and gave us the coupon that expires Dec. 24, 2009

3. Ustream Broadcaster: A good app (free) for live video streaming from your iPhone. The first time you use the App, you will be asked to register for a free Ustream account. The audio quality is good only if you are real close to the iPhone compared to recording an event at a distance. Recently, I used this to have my parents in India watch our kids perform live ! Priceless....Once your account is registered, the Ustream live broadcaster link is unique to your account (For example, my personal URL is http://stre.am/9Dj5). As you see my laptop screen in the live broadcast below. It also allows you to save the video and share it on the social web.