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"Pull" Barcode Scanning Could Be Android's Killer App
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Sep 28, 2008 05:39 PM
from the be-a-frugal-gourmet dept.
from the be-a-frugal-gourmet dept.
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."
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Freedom is the killer app (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's just hope Google (and her telco partners) don't fuck it up.
Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:5, Insightful)
My bet is on the stores to screw it up. Most stores get edgy about you whipping out a camera in their store. Now use that camera to potentially lose them money and see them throw a big hissy fit.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You must go to different stores to me.
Besides which, who cares about this bar code scanning crap? What's important is that we have an open platform with some decent market penetration that an industry can grow up on.
Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe people who are reading a story about bar code scanning?
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barcode scanning crap (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:5, Insightful)
If a store trys to stop me whipping a camera out to compare prices ill just not shop there. If they dont stop me theres just a possibility I may not shop there. If they try to stop me using my own device they can fuck right off, even if they are the cheapest. ill just go to the next cheapest etc.
Pretty drunk so please dont mod me harshley for this mini rant
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Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty drunk so please dont mod me harshley for this mini rant
+1 en vino veritas?
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Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:4, Informative)
+1 en vino veritas?
s/en/in/
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Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:5, Funny)
I live in the Vatican, you insensitive clod!
Disclaimer: I don't actually live in the Vatican.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Grammatici Cluent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
i'm not sure...
I once went on a photo scavenger hunt....one of the things I needed a photo of was in target. I (like an idiot) had a Nikon D40 with a massive freaking external flash mounted on the top.
I thought I was going to get thrown out or arrested, instead the store employees thought it was funny/a neat idea (the scavenger hunt, i mean).
So you never know. Keep in mind that most fo the clerks you encounter are, in fact, 17 year old kids.
Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:4, Insightful)
Pricing isn't necessarily the killer app though.
it's reviews of products. There is a lot of stuff I see, and would buy at a store, but can't tell if it sucks or not.
Often times the instant gratification out-weighs the price savings of online. But rarely does it out-weigh the risk of crap.
I would probably spend more at retail stores with this device.
Parent
Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently, whatever application supports scan-barcode-and-show-comparison-pricing needs to also take into account:
Ideally, it'd also warn you of the time involved, especially with an on-line order that needs 2-3 weeks to get to you, but even for just driving across town (which can be hours for large towns, especially during rush hour(s)).
Kinda like the idiots that drive all over the place looking to save a few cents per litre (or worse, per gallon) when filling up. Seriously, folks, saving an entire cent per litre, in my 60L tank, means I'm saving an entire 60 cents. At current prices, that's about half a litre of fuel. At my current fuel economy, that's approximately 5km of driving. Yours won't be significantly different. Same comparison has to be made about saving $1 on your DVD, or $250 on a couch (much more worth it). e.g., I saved about $300 on my last computer by driving to the other side of town (approx 30km each way). That was worth it. But most day-to-day purchases won't be worth it. Any app that fails to remind math-challenged users about this fact will be doing their users a huge disservice.
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Re:Freedom is the killer app (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like the boundaries of what's considered acceptable behavior, behave exceptionally and let the boundaries catch up.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because it's the rule of the store doesn't make it _right_.
Babylon 5 and the ringtone model. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, I've witnessed this trend, and I wasn't sure what to make of it, but it is happening. I had a Motorola SLVR -- kind of an underpowered phone, but an attractive candybar style phone nevertheless. One feature it had which I liked was the ability to use voice dialing with a bluetooth headset.
When I upgraded to a Samsung A737, I got a phone which was much more capable in some ways (faster processor and more memory, thus faster at running Java apps and so forth), but I noticed that voice dialing was
smells like a polecat (Score:5, Informative)
Or a CueCat [wikipedia.org]. We know how big of a killer app.
Re:smells like a polecat (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:smells like a polecat (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Sadly, the CueCat did have a very practical application that I used it for, but I had to hack it first. There is a program out there called CatNip that will let you use the CueCat as a standard light pen. When combined with a a databasing program for media such as those from CollectorZ, which refrences your material to stuff it pulls off the internet, you suddenly have a very cool product. I can now scan a UPC symbol on a movie, it pulls the description off of IMDB and cover art from Amazon or DVDEmpire or one of the dozens of other DVD sites out there, and makes a nice list. I can then specify where the movie is located, and even check movies out to my friends, and know where they all are through this cool app. I can then publish the whole list to html and upload it to a site, so now all my friends can see what movies I have.
So, yes, the CueCat was very cool and useful and I still use mine. Problem is, I found absolutely ZERO value in what they were actually trying to use it for.
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Re:smells like a polecat (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yes, the CueCat was very cool and useful and I still use mine. Problem is, I found absolutely ZERO value in what they were actually trying to use it for.
And therein lies the tale of why Android just might have a chance -- IIRC, CueCat did their best to stop people from using it in ways other than what it was sold for. They sued some people, IIRC, tried to obfuscate the data format, had a unique key from each cuecat sent back with the rest of the data for tracking individual cuecats, and generally acted like dickheads and thus went under.
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Re:smells like a polecat (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Mine came with my Wired subscription...
Oh, god, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Informative? This? On Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
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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Re:Oh, god, no. (Score:5, Funny)
...in 40 years I would hope a robotic car can deliver it and put it away in my house.
That's right robo-grocer! Put those groceries away! If anyone needs me, I'll be in the holodeck doing a virtual 3-way with "v-teens gone wild".
Parent
Re:Oh, god, no. (Score:4, Insightful)
40 years ago you could do that, too. You just had to use the phone instead of a computer. What's more, many more people had a subscription to milk.
Of course, there's a reason the job of "grocery deliverer" was something people would actually consider...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Today I can order my grocery's online
Order your grocery's what online? Do your groceries need accessories, or something?
Well, lemme give you an example (Score:3, Interesting)
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
iPhone killer? Really? YES! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:iPhone killer? Really? YES! (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Simple number recgonition would work too (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Scan bar code? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Killer App? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again, maybe the poster is using "killer app" in a different way than I would...
A bit illogical... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
comments from someone who has used it (Score:5, Informative)
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:iPhone slow and unreliable because of 2M camera (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:iPhone slow and unreliable because of 2M camera (Score:4, Funny)
Oh baby, don't be so negative.
I'm karmkarmakarmakarmkarmachemeleon...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 pow
Re:"Delicious Library" MacOSX since 2004 wUSB webc (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.