Video Reviews for Sears

This past weekend we participated (and won runner-up) at the Sears Hackathon. Our hack lets people rate and then record and submit video reviews of their products. To incentivize people to leave videos, we suggested a random drawing each week for prizes. We had folks leave phone numbers so they could be notified if they'd won. After leaving a video review, we also asked if they wanted to leave a review on Foursquare -- and if so, we sent them to the Foursquare site. We explained that purchases were twice as likely to occur when products had videos associated with them. We had lots of fun persuading other hackers to give video reviews of a pair sunglasses -- and we're able to convince the brother of one of the founders to visit a Sears store and record a video review together with his baby, Benno. Thanks to Oliver Friedmann, we built the hack using Ziggeo's API and combined it with the Sears API for Product Search and their API for Product Details. We also combined it with Twilio's API for text messages and Foursquare's location-based API.