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Amazon Japan Offers Barcode Purchases via Camera Phone
Zode writes "Jesse James Garrett reports
that Amazon Mobile Japan customers can purchase a item with their camera phones. "Snap a photo of a product bar code using your cell phone, and Amazon Japan will give you a price check," according to Garrett, relaying from this article in Ketai Watch (Wireless Watch).
Here's the English translation from Babelfish."
It looks as though the shopping is done from bar codes on Real-ads :)
:)
Bar codes are kinda hard to get right on a mobile phone camera (but I think high end only).
This is the beginning of a new cross-shopping trend. Enter a shop, look for a product , enter in amazon , measure urgency vs economy , pick it up or order
I already saw a company in India offer an IR universal remote control for their phones (Nokia 3220 IIRC) . Was a trial version for 15 days after which it asks whether you want to buy the app. You pay for it through your mobile too and the bill comes down to you as part of your monthly phone bill.
M-commerce , eh ?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
QR codes are 2-dimensional barcodes. But even at the resolution you are saying, the cameras fail to read many badly printed codes.
The problem in many cases is that the code is too small to discern by the reading hardware/software. QR codes can even be self-correcting such that even if you lose up to 75% of the original code the full amount of information is still available. But sometimes those codes printed on business cards are just too small to make out for the keitai.
Prices on books in Japan are pretty much fixed. The price including or excluding tax (which is a standard 5% across the country) are printed on the book by the publisher. I guess there are discounters, but Amazon doesn't seem to be one of them. All prices there seem to be standard, or maybe 5% or so off.
Japan does other weird things like splitting books into two halves. I'm not sure what purpose this serves, since usually they're sold together. I guess you could maybe buy the first half and then decide if you want to buy and read the second half or not. Maybe it's easier to hold one small book at a time rather than one large book.
My kanji and vocabulary are so weak that all I can read are manga for kids. Even then, I need a dictionary, and I'm probably picking up all kinds of weird childish or goofy expressions.
My other first post is car post.
It means mobile and is used as a slang (or rather abbrevation) for mobile phone (which is keitai-denwa). So keitai watch is a news site about phones, not wireless stuff in general.
It's BTW pronounced ke-tai.
Buy all your crazy japanese videogames from
I said 'readable', I didn't say 'good'... I'm at work. Anyway:
Amazon japan have updated the mobile phone version of the amazon.co.jp shopping site, which they run. The menu and search screens have been completely redone, and for iMode, there's a service starting whereby you can scan a barcode using your phone and look up or buy an item.
The amazon.co.jp online store mobile verison was opened in 2001 but has been remade in the light of the improved power and functionality of mobile phones. The 'home & kitchen' and 'toy & hobby' stores, included in the PC version of the site, are now in the mobile version, and products not in the PC version's 'marketplace' can be bought too. Recommendations appear too, in the form of search keyword rankings and the CD sales rankings from the US version.
The navigation and search functionality of the menu screens has been enhanced too. In each store, bargain corner products, 'campaign' (ie sales promotion) information, and discounted 'red' prices are visible -- as well as product images. In product search, detailed search features are available depending on the type of product, and a search can be done from any screen.
As a new experiment, the iMode-oriented 'Amazon Scan Search' service has been begun. With this, you download a free specialized application, and using the camera in your mobile you can scan the barcodes on items. After scanning, a request is sent to the mobile version of amazon.co.jp, and if the item is one that can be obtained at that site, you can order it. The same company also suggests you use the feature when ordering consumables, or when you want an item like one that your freind has, or when you want to see what related products are for sale. The 'Vodaphone Live!' version of EZWeb is also considering the iMode trend.
A product launch was held on the 22nd. Amazon's representative director, Jasper Chan, emphasized the convenience of the new service, saying 'With Scan Search, discovering Amazon products has become unbelievably easy!' Concerning the remake of the mobile version of the site, he said 'We see mobiles as strategically vital' and describing the enthusiasm with which the matter will be taken forward, he said 'Whatever functionality is available to the PC version will, more and more, be in the mobile version as well. On the other hand, we will also be building functionality specially to suit mobiles'.
The amazon.co.jp mobile version is accessed via iMode from 'Shopping Ticket', via EZWeb from 'Shopping'/'Books/CDs/DVDs', and via Vodaphone Live! from 'Shopping/Ticket'/'Books/CDs/DVDs/Games'.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Especially for making links on flyers easy to follow with your i-mode or ez-web (two largest mobile online services in Japan) enabled phone.
You just smack a barcode on the bottom of your ad-flyer (for the latest PS2-game, or whatever) and have people shooting them with their phone-camera and instantly get redirected to the product homepage. Kinda neat and really handy as entering URLs on a phone is a real pain in the ass.
These barcodes also confirm to some sort of standard (dunno the name), so it's easy for whoever to print out their own barcodes recognizable by the phones.
Buy all your crazy japanese videogames from
There is Barcode Reader for Symbian phones too: http://www.barreader.com/
Introduction, Preliminary, Inventions not Patentable clearly mentions something about e-Patents .. so that post can be easily forgotten .
India does offer Process Patents but explicitly prevents patenting naturally occurring substances or extracts there of. However you are free to patent your form of culturing or producing an anti-biotic or vaccine. Patent infringement can be enforced in India as is with any other country in the world. Interestingly , Prior art of Foreign origin are valid in India - unlike the USPTO .
Get an OSS Loving, Nuke Missile Desgning President for your country too :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Yeah, they split them because Japanese books are historically a smaller form factor than Western ones. Lord of the Rings, for example, is sold as an 11 book box set. Smaller books fit in handbags better, and given than nearly everyone in Tokyo has a painfully long commute, making books small enough to hold in one hand while standing is a good idea. I used to reverse commute from my place in central Tokyo out to the National Cancer Center East, about 2 hours in all, and standing most of the way. Little books would have been nice.
No, it's not entirely different. The concept is still the same. You see any bar code, you scan it, not just the special QueCat barcodes. QueCat took you to thier website to get the prices online retailers paid them to list, Amazon takes you to thier website to get thier price directly. This, in effect, is a portable QueCat. The idea is to steal the sale out from under the retailers nose.
They were trying to do target advertising where you could scan a paper catalog and they would take you to a propreitery website with the information.
This meant that you had to do it from home, and you knew _their_ prices for the catalogs.
The whole Digital Convergence thing at its heart was a neat idea. Frankly barcodes have been part of our lives for decades. It was only common sense to actually make software that would take advantage of it.
As far as doing it from home, I'm sure someone wrote a driver for the palm, but I doubt DC thought above and beyond laptops as far as a portable solution. At the time wireless internet was pretty rare.
(they also had something where you could connect to the TV, if am not mistaken)
AudioCues. Sometimes you got a mono rca to 1/8th inch headphone jack from the places that offered USB cuecats. Radioshack sold them. Again this was a pretty neat idea being able to have embedded urls on audio broadcasts. This was the one technology DC had a patent on IIRC, the one technology that no one seemed to be all that interested in. But it required that the end user not only have a free rca audio out from the TV, but their PC close enough to the pc to make a cable even desirable. And people didn't want to fuck with moving their crap around.
WIFI is far more likely to make this dream of "do you want to know more press here" a reality.
Either way, their model failed because they were giving away a piece of hardware away for free.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that. I feel they bit off more then they could chew. Their business plan was to basically get millions of people using this thing in under a year without establishing a nitch base. If I were to get average people to use the product, I'd start with CD and book collectors. Hell readerware is still around; a company I believe was formed around making an application out of the free barcode reader. If DC failed anywhere it's because they had no application that people were interested in. Sure they can scan in a Campbels can of soup, and their software would take you to their webstite, but not do anything useful beyond keeping track of who likes Campbel's soup. The few people who were interested in the CueCat had no interest in Digital Convergence.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Prices on books in Japan are pretty much fixed. The price including or excluding tax (which is a standard 5% across the country) are printed on the book by the publisher. I guess there are discounters, but Amazon doesn't seem to be one of them. All prices there seem to be standard, or maybe 5% or so off.
Actually, there is a law (something along the lines of protecting cultural identity) that specifically forbids selling new books/magazines for less than the marked price. Amazon.jp would love to discount their non-imported books, but simply cannot.
The 5% discount that you notice is probably for books that are also sold outside Japan.
I live in Japan.
They didn't ban the phones, but came up with a uniquely Japanese compromise.
They got together with the phone maker association and got them to agree that when phones take a picture, they *must* (all phones do it now BTW) make LOUD camera clicking sounds, or play LOUD music that you can hear across the store...
This way the store keeper can hear the sound, come and throw you out...