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We’ve previously covered Swap.com, the collaborative consumption service that allows you to share your unwanted books, video games, movies and CD’s with folks who want them. The site has facilitated over 1.9 million trades between users, and is an efficient way to save money and reduce your carbon footprint while still getting the entertainment you’re looking for.

Swap.com’s intuitive interface has ensured its place as one of the most successful sharing services to date, but until now it has suffered from a design flaw: the need to manually enter your items to swap, a potentially time-consuming process. With the announcement of a Swap.com app for iPhone, the process has become as easy as can be, allowing users to scan items’ UPC codes with the iPhone camera and instantly add them to the service.

The iPhone app serves as a self-contained portal to the service, allowing users to initiate, accept, or reject swaps on the go, pay the swap fee and shipping through PayPal, and even email the shipping label to print later. The app becomes even more useful when you take it out into the world: see a book or movie in a store that you’re considering buying? Scan the UPC code with the app and see if you can get a better deal by trading with another Swap.com user.

An Android app is in the works for non-iPhone users, and of course, you can still share items through your trusty old web browser at Swap.com. But with this mobile app, managing your items–and finding deals on books, movies and games you want–has gotten much more efficient.

Paul M. Davis

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul M. Davis

Paul M. Davis tells stories online and off, exploring the spaces where data, art, and civics intersect. I currently work with a number of organizations including Pivotal and


Things I share: Knowledge, technology, reusable resources, goodwill.