After the investment in Empire Avenue last week I am very excited to announce another investment today: Barcode Hero‘s mission is to help shoppers in physical stores, through breakthrough mobile technology. Simply put, it is like a “Foursquare for shopping”: Barcode Hero users scan products at home or in a store, build their collection, and share recommendations with friends. Users can follow others to get their recommendations and compete for fun titles based on the products they interact with.

I met the two founders of the company, Blake Scholl and Jason Crawford, back in March in Seattle and decided after one meeting and a few emails exchanges that I wanted to invest. I usually take a bit longer for taking an investment decision but this one just felt right. First of all, there is tons of opportunity at the cross-roads of mobile, social and commerce to come up with the right product to help shoppers in an offline context. Secondly, Blake and Jason had convinced a few A-list angels like Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant and Owen van Natta to participate in the seed round. But most importantly, this just felt like a rock star team of founders with the right vision, background (Amazon, Whrrl) and ambition.

So really excited to be part of the Barcode Hero story forward – you can get the iPhone app here and try the product out yourself (currently only working in the US app store though).

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