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"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."
Let's just hope Google (and her telco partners) don't fuck it up.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Or a CueCat. We know how big of a killer app.
If this takes off, it'll result with me waiting in the supermarket checkout line for 5 minutes behind some idiot arguing with the cashier because his phone says a different price to the register. As if phones in supermarkets haven't caused me enough grief...
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
This is spot-on. Yes, many years ago there was an attempt to invest heavily in barcode readers - the Cuecat, in particular, was a well-funded attempt to bring barcodes to the masses. But due to a major error in their business model - a grave error - the 'cat lived an extremely short life.
Jump ahead to 2008. People are buying fancy telephones, and there are barcodes everywhere. Google is in a unique position to read and process these barcodes on the fly - using a well-connected application living on a mobile phone. Next thing you know, you'll be able to go to the store, pick up a six pack of Bud, and scan in that barcode. THEN you can find a cheaper vendor - maybe down the street. YOU WIN due to CHEAPER BEER.
And we know that the world, with its flailing economy, will certainly needs cheaper beer. The cuecat was just ahead of its time.
I have bar code scanning on my latest phone. It doesn't work. The camera just keeps going in and out of focus. Having never had much to do with barcodes in my IT work, I decided to look at open source bar code readers and scanned in the bar codes on a few things (like my son's birth certificate). I looked and the standards and my own scans quickly found that often the number was often printed right beneath the barcode. Barcodes were made when computers were slow and had trouble doing OCR. They're a lot better now. Bar code scanning is still useful to some degree but to call it a killer app is a bit much.
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I used to work for a big (biggest?) developer of games for mobile phones and I think we used to sell games in Japan using some sort of barcodes (with squares). We would put game ads in magazines and the user would just scan the barcode with the phone and buy the game. So this is nothing new or that difficult to do, it just hasn't caught up in the west yet. Hmmm, so I just checked and it seems that those were the QR-codes that the article talks about. I never bothered to check before as we were just making the games...
I just did an experiment and indeed the phone does not seem to be able to take a reliable picture of a bar code. I don't think it has to do with resolution as much as the crappy lens inherent in cell phone cameras along with the the fact that cell phone cameras were not made for macro photography, a tricky proposition even with a real cameras. To take back the resolution thing, a higher resolution may let the software extract the bar from a normal, non macro, photo.
So here are my two questions. First, is the lens on the G1 that much better? Second, Isn't this fundamentally a software problem. A bar code is a defined form with a known and rigid structure. Even with a blurry/fuzzy photograph, it should be possible to clean up the bars. For that matter, why are we even dealing with bars. The numbers are there under the bars. Why not use those?
In any case, how many people use this application? This is the first I heard of it. I certainly don't go around taking pictures of bar codes. The only time I thought about doing it was for my library, but a scanner seems like a faster solution.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Huh? The sentence you quoted is about scanning 1D barcodes, and you say the iPhone can handle 2D barcodes. Guess what? The point was that 1D barcodes are harder to scan than 2D barcodes (RTFA). 2D barcodes were designed precisely for lower-resolution cameras, but the downside is that most products still have only 1D barcodes. The G1 has a higher-resolution camera (3 megapixels vs 2) and can handle them better.
Are we seriously considering a bar code scanner a "kiler app"? To me, a killer app is one which makes you absolutely want it, even if it means making a different hardware decision. You know, like how Halo is a killer app for XBox. A barcode scanner might be neat or even nifty and, to some rare individuals, it might be an absolutely killer app, but for the majority of people I see it being nothing more than a novelty app - something that's cool to have and you use from time to time but, most of the time, you forget you even have it.
Then again, maybe the poster is using "killer app" in a different way than I would...
There's a fair bit of a difference between optics and sensor pixel count... 2 Megapixel tells me almost nothing about actual image quality. Other details are more important here, especially because barcode scanning requires very different features, like the ability to focus on nearby objects, that many phone cameras lack, regardless of the sensor.
Also, while you are speaking of 2D barcodes, 1D barcodes are a very different matter. 2D barcodes work well with camera-based sensors, and are often designed to work well with phones. 1D barcodes are far harder to read with camera phones, and I expect that the iPhone, like every other phone I've tried, is unable to do so well. 1D barcodes require far higher resolution of thin parallel lines, and weren't designed to be scanned by camera; they also tend to need to be in focus. Unfortunately, these are far more prevalent than the 2D barcodes that are easy to read.
That said, I'm doubtful that the G1 will be able to read 1D barcodes well either, unless the optics have been designed to facilitate it. Better optics doesn't imply that the optics are better for such a special case.
Ok... TFA pushes the idea for what would essentially be a product database.
You scan the bar-code, it gets sent to the server, which returns useful data to you.
OK... I can see how that should be useful to consumers as well as a hypothetical company that makes its living out of contextual commercials.
BUT... The TFA goes on and on about how it MUST be 1D barcodes and NOT 2D barcodes - despite the fact that 2D barcodes are easier to read for mobile phones because of redundancy and greater bandwidth.
And since The New PhoneTM has the optics that can FINALLY read 1D barcodes - let us make a database that handles ONLY 1D barcodes.
Cause... there is like a lot of them out there.
Hmm... how about this GROUND BREAKING idea I just had.
Make the "killer app" capable of reading both 1D AAAND... wait for it... 2D barcodes.
HA?! Isn't THAT fuckin' brilliant or what?
At the cost of... umm... nothing... you get a "killer app" that works on The New PhoneTM AND all those phones out there already.
Which it would be pretty stupid to just disregard.
Cause... there is like a lot of them out there.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Finish reading the summary, please. That's a description of push-scanning, while Android and Google can provide pull-scanning.
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.
I got my start doing stuff like this on the PalmOS Symbol handheld scanners back in 1999. I've done this same stuff for years on various handhelds running mobile OS's. As long as you can scan a freaking barcode, you can store that info and hit that website when you sync...whether it's through a wired connection, a wireless connection, it doesn't matter.
You can reinvent something 10 years later that people have done for years, and now it is a "killer app". If Google does it, apparently, idiots pay attention and it is suddenly, somehow, feasible and marketable.
Oh baby, don't be so negative.
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webcams are different from fixed focal length cameras.
most fixed focal length cameras are set to infinity. that means if you take a close range picture it's all blurry, beyond the ability of fast recognition. if the camera has higher resolution, the less the blur affects the recognition by software.
most webcams are set to a focal length of a few feet, or come with auto focus, or manual focus..
so a webcam can be lower res and have better image recognition, oh yeah and a laptop has a lot more processing power than a phone. that makes a huge speed difference.
also with higher resolution you can take the picture farther away, and still have enough pixels, it is true there are scanner apps for the iphone, but most likely they have compromised between speed and ability to read blurred photos.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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.
Actual website http://www.delicious-monster.com/ It was quite a splash in 2004.
If this concept of "i'll just scan this bar code and find out that there's a cheaper one across the street" becomes common practice, stores will just shift to having all unique bar codes. You can already see this with certain products. There will be a store-specific UPC/model number at Walmart vs Target vs Best Buy.
Let's hope they don't. But really, that's the nice thing about an open platform. unless they absolutely decide to kill it, it'll fly because the consumers want it to. And that's different from any other platform -- American cell phone systems have tried desperately (and largely succeeded) in absolutely killing anything the customer might want, because they see everything as a revenue stream ala ring-tones.
It's bizarre. If the customer wants it, the telcos gleefully KILL IT and give them a crippled, pay-as-you-go version. This when the cell phone manufacturers are begging them to take phone with features, so the manufacturers can get some market cred/traction. But no, the cell phone carriers demand that features in phones be killed.
Sigh. It's been embarrassing. You go to just about any other country and they've got better phones than use. Why? Because the telcos have the American consumer by the balls, thanks to a hefty lobbyist (read as "bribery") budget.
But unless I'm missing something, here, if a telco supports an Android based phone, the consumer gets control and whistles and bells. Period.
Hence, either telcos accept android based phones, or ...
They SAY they will and phone manufacturers make 18 models of android phone, and then the telcos say, "GREAT! We love it! Just disable this and this and this." The phone manufacturers say "Sure!" and the phones go out, and we fix them. This happens for one year, and the telcos start telling the manufacturers to drop Android, or they won't buy their cheaper, crappier phones in bulk. And the manufacturers will get very, very afraid, and mysteriously stop supporting Android.
We'll see. I hope this represents a real change.
---
It's not the acting. When just one actor stinks, that's acting. When they all stink, that's writing and directing. Mostly directing. And it's not that you get inured to it, Straczynski and his helpers got better at it.
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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.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"I imagine it won't be long before you can search with whatever engine you can think of."
And then Google will release a standard search engine plugin which the majority of non-technical users will then simply use by default. Plus the Google one could even be pre-installed by default. Google then gets the information they origonally designed this feature for. The ability to know what products the majority of users are interested in. This is just like Google's way of profiling searches on their web site, to then workout from an advertisers point of view, what products people are interested in. Now Google will be able to extend that goal onto knowing what physical products we scan in. Its another step towards their goal of total information awareness on people.
It would be interesting to combine this barcode scanning data with GPS data, as that would then give a lot more infomation.
Google wants to becoming Big Brother. Because with total information comes huge power (even political power) and with huge power they have the potential to earn huge amounts of money profiling everyone, to then sell that data to advertisers. But then even political campaign's need to be advertised and marketed, so Google is aiming to become litrally Big Brother.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Well, I don't know about him, but I _have_ been stuck in a line while someone is arguing with the cashier what the price should be.
E.g., I wanted to buy some computer component at some point, so I go to a local small computer store. What do you know? Both guys behind the counter are stuck respectively with:
1. Someone who couldn't decide if she wants her new computer without a power supply or without the CD-ROM drive, because she apparently didn't have the money for the complete sum. So she's standing there debating the merits of getting a computer that won't start, vs a computer she can't install stuff on.
2. A couple which wanted to buy some TV decoder card. But they had a price list from another shop, for another product, and were prepared to argue all evening why the product in this shop should cost the same. The talk went roughly like this:
Buyer: "But your competitors sell the same thing for less!"
Clerk: "Well, it's not the same thing in the first place. That model is from another manufacturer and does less."
Buyer: "But they sell it cheaper! Why can't you match their price?"
Clerk: "Because it's a different product and has a different price. See, this one also has <insert list of features>, and the manufacturer sells it for more."
Buyer: "But I don't care much about those features, so for me they're the same. And those other guys sell it cheaper."
Clerk: "So buy it that model from them, then."
Buyer: "But I want this one..."
Clerk: "Well, ok, that'll be X euros then."
Buyer: "Why do I have to pay that, when your competitors sell the same thing for less?"
Clerk: "Because it's not the same thing."
That conversation ran around in circles like a broken record for half a fucking hour. Well, probably more, because it was already going when I arrived, and it was still going when I just left the shop half an hour later. There's a huge line of people inside the shop, people getting fed up and leaving all the time, but the idiot just won't give up. He wants product X at the price of product Y, 'cause they're in the same category.
I can just see this kind of thing happening with a camera phone just as well. Only now the idiots don't even have to get the price list of the other shop first. They can now do it on the fly.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Griffin Technology makes an iPhone 3G case called the Clarifi with a built-in mini-macro lens. Perfect for this sort of thing.
Two basic problems trying to scan store codes and convert to UPC
1) the store's internal numbers may not be unique (may clash with another store, of they may re-use a number again and again as stock comes in and out.)
2) The barcode will need different decoding software. Taking Borders as an example again, their barcodes contain far more stripes than a standard UPC barcode. More stripes require greater phone resolution and clarity to accurately scan. And different decoding algorithms (the barcode could be alpha-numeric instead of all-numeric.)
BTW: UPC is dead. Every US store is supposed to support EAN now (13-digits world-wide standard vs 12-digit US-centric scheme)
It's not "openness" pixie dust, no, that makes the barcode app better on Android v. iPhone. It's a 3MP auto-focus camera and API that actually lets you access the video stream rather than make you wait 8 seconds, such that you can make a usable barcode reader.