Nice, concise, informative article by Eric Lin about barcodes and cameraphones:
Neomedia was the first company to announce it would launch a barcode-reading price comparison application for cameraphones over a year ago. This week Scanbuy, which joined the barcode race shortly after Neomedia, has launched a beta application for a number of smartphones, beating Neomedia to market. Symbian and Treo smartphone users can download and install an application which will allow them to take a picture of a barcode on many books and products and return a price comparison from PriceGrabber or Amazon. The ScanZOOM software is not free. Scanbuy charges $20 for the application and a macro lens adapter to sharpen pictures of small UPC or ISBN codes printed on packaging.
Comments
@ 03:55
What is Mobility?
@ 08:54
Mobile price comparison tools have a rather odd idiosyncrasy.
People who are very price sensitive about saving money are also going to be very price sensitive about how they go about doing this. In other words, they’ll be the least likely people to pay to use such an application.
In addition, for this sort of service to really work, it has to save dollars not cents - every time you use it. By the time you’d paid to make the comparison, it’s only going to be worth using if you’ve saved a significant slug of dosh. And if you use it and it doesn’t save you money, you have to be sure it’s going to save you even more next time to absorb the cost of 2 comparisons, rather than just 1.
These applications aren’t the no-brainers they first might appear to be.
Russell
http://www.mobile-weblog.com