"Pull" Barcode Scanning Could Be Android's Killer App

Seor Jojoba writes "The release of T-Mobile's G1 Smartphone is shifting focus away from push-based barcode scanning, where embedded URLs send you to locations of a vendor's choosing. There is now more interest in pull-scanning, where product information is retrieved from user-specified sources. It may be that QR-Codes and other 2D barcodes will have their thunder stolen by 1970s-era linear barcodes. On the iPhone, scanning a 1D barcode is slow and unreliable. But the G1's improved optics and Android's improved access to image scans has made 1D scanning quick and useful, opening the gateway for killer apps that help people make spending decisions."

Comments

smells like a polecat

[sohp]

Or a CueCat. We know how big of a killer app.

Re:smells like a polecat

[Sancho]

Yeah, what a great idea that was. Let's give away scanners, and then people can scan a barcode and be taken to a website, so its ad supported. Problem was, to get that barcode, you pretty much had to own the item, at which time, you were like, um, what is the point of researching the item AFTER you buy it. Kind of a gimick.

You missed the point. Cuecats were given away with Radio Shack catalogs, which included the bar code for almost every item listed. In a way, it acted as a bridge between old mail-order (catalogs) and e-commerce. They were never intended to be used with anything else (even already purchased items, as they wouldn't read standard barcodes), and I think that there were even some takedown notices regarding the various hacks, at first.

Re:iPhone slow and unreliable because of 2M camera

[Sentry21]

The submitter is quite right. I have an iPhone, and the biggest challenge with doing as the camera suggests (a coworker of mine had the same idea) is that it uses a fixed-focus lens, set to 'infinity', which means that it cannot focus on near objects - so the barcode has to be far enough that it's within the focal range, but big enough that it can be seen from there.

comments from someone who has used it

[rbrome]

I was at the T-Mobile/Google launch event last week in NYC, and had a chance to try this. I also have an iPhone.

First, this is not a Google-made app, it's called ShopSavvy and it's from a third party. It will come preloaded on the T-Mobile G1, though.

It's neat. It's very easy to use and returns simple links to product reviews and prices from multiple online sources.

vs. the iPhone:

Barcodes on the iPhone are NOT slow. They ARE unreliable, because the iPhone has a fixed lens that simply cannot focus on something up close.

The G1's "improved optics" is an auto-focus lens that can focus on things up close. That's why this works. It's very slow, though.

"Improved access to image scans" is bullshit. It's the same in Android as the iPhone or any smartphone, at least for something like barcodes.

MANY smartphones have a high-res camera with auto-focus lens and can run third-party software like this (which has existed for a while). It's nothing new. It's only in the news now because Google chose to feature it during their press conference and demo session at the event in NYC last week.

Also, the whole 1D vs 2D thing is beside the point. 1D is the type that's printed on all products at any SHOP, so of course it's the type that a SHOPPING application is designed to scan.

Re:Interesting.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

As long as you can scan a freaking barcode, you can store that info and hit that website when you sync

And that's where you missed the point about why this idea is getting a little bit of hype - this isn't about doing it as a batch job at some point in the future, it is about real-time lookups. So you can scan that box of cereal in the grocery and know immediately if their pricing is in line with other nearby stores and online sources or if the price is jacked up by 50 cents because they don't expect people to comparison shop very closely for something as mundane as a box of cereal.

It could even be smarter than that - tell the software that you are going to go shopping at two stores and as you shop at the first store, the app tells you if the product you just scanned is cheaper here or at the next store. If it is cheaper here, put it in the basket, if it is cheaper at the next store then you put it back on the shelf and the application adds it to the shopping list for the next store.

It is all about the convenience, waiting for a sync is not convenient.

Informative? This? On Slashdot?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Come on, as a programmer/designer this pisses me off. Only a complete and UTTER idiot would include price info in the barcode.

What if you had a price change? You would have to change the barcode on all your products.

As the article explains and anyone on slashdot could expected to know, a barcode (the 1D kind we are talking about here) ONLY has enough information for 10 digits. It is a 'unique' indentifier. The cash register scans this unique code and then looks it up in the stores database to get the price and whatever other information you could require.

To think that you would put the price of a product in the barcode is silly. ONE of the reasons why the switch to barcodes has seen the removal of price-stickers on products is that with barcodes you can easily change the price.

The OP simply meant to point out that he got the PRICE from the INTERNET with the unique code and is arguing that the price retrieved by the cashregister from the stores database is in-accurate.

And this discussion already happens daily in stores whenever there is an mistake made with special offers or a new product incorrectly entered.

My own recent story is of a frozen fries, used to be 1kg packages but suddenly they had 2.5kg packages but no record of it in the database. In the end, I got it for the price of 1kg while they went and sorted it out :) Got to love lousy math skills, a fair price would have been 2x the price of 1kg, but I suppose that was to complex.