In-Store Price-Check Options - Technology Evangelist

Every year, a new company attempts to make a cell phone application that can read barcodes, transmit that information across the web, then return comparative price information. Overall, it's a great concept, but I think companies are overthinking this one.

Companies are creating a ton of hurdles for themselves as they attempt to solve this problem. By framing the problem as a bar code scanning, reading, and transmission problem, they need to solve photo quality issues caused by humans who are very inconsistent when it comes to taking pictures.

They also have to overcome the software installation hurdle, which means they have to write software that runs on multiple platforms, convince people to install it, support the various versions over time, get people to upgrade it, etc. That's a lot of work.

With that in mind, I think a new service called BooksPrice is going about solving this interesting issue in a much smarter way. Forget about mobile software. Instead, use SMS to communicate.

People are pretty good at texting compared to taking pictures. And it's not that hard to find an text an ISBN number.

In BooksPrice.com's model, they're using Twitter to make this all happen. You follow BooksPrice on Twitter. They follow you back. Then, the next time you want to look up a book's price, just send a directly tweet to booksprice like this:

To generate a response to your phone like this:

No mobile software required. Free to consumers. Available on all mobile devices that can send/receive text messages.

Very cool.

For any one company, Amazon probably has the largest data set of publicly published UPCs. But Google surely has more.

As of now, Google isn't returning any price results for that query. Instead, they respond stating that they know it's a UPC but they'd rather have me give them a product name & model, which is rather strange.

I tied the Amazon.com Your Media Library bar code scanning with my iSight and it was impossible. I even hooked up a real camcorder via firewire to get better control so it might work but still no dice. The idea of scanning barcodes sounds awesome and i'd love it if someone could get it to work, but right now, manually entering in data is still the way to go.

Comments

1. Posted by: ryan l on December 4, 2008 3:33 PM:

Shop Savvy on the G1 is dead simple to use....it doesn't take a picture per say as much as use the camera as a scanner a red bar changes to green when you hold the phone still enough for an accurate reading.

The problem is that the only real source of online products with barcode datasets so far is amazon. Another problem is that when this technology gains any traction...retailers will have long since forced their suppliers to supply them with store specific QR or bar codes on any product that they carry. Ie your scan of that toasters barcode in walmart will send you online to??? you guessed it walmart-dot-com

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