PaperClip for Cell Phones

“Digital Convergence”:http://www.digitalconvergence.com/ went away, probably because they had to give away millions of free barcode readers in order to make their “connect bar codes to the internet” solution work. Handheld, cabled-to-the-computer barcode readers were too clumsy for everyday use (although mine works great attached to an old PC in my library :-).

“NeoMedia Technologies”:http://www.neom.com/ has the right idea: “PaperClick”:http://www.paperclick.com/ for Cell Phones lets you take a picture of a barcode with your camera phone, and have information about that barcode appear on your cellphone’s browser.

The example everyone’s talking about is “displaying the Amazon price for a book”:http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20030930005562&newsLang=en, but I think there are other interesting (if more mundane) uses, like bringing up nutritional data or competitive pricing while browsing supermarket shelves…

The big winners are the cell phone providers, who now have a “killer app” for the high-speed data networks they’ve been building :-)

[ I wonder what’s up with DC’s patents on this technology? ]

posted at 9:38 pm on Friday, October 03, 2003 in Science and Technology | Comments (4)

4 Comments

  1. joy says:
    2003-10-03 at 22:12

    If I remember it correctly, the problem with the cue cat wasn’t that it was cabled, but instead because all of your scans were monitored by Digital Convergence.

    There was a way to neuter the cue cat and turn it into a normal bar code scanner.

    Oh, and I still have mine sitting in an odds and ends box somewhere around here….

  2. Mike says:
    2003-12-22 at 15:50

    I have a Nokia 3650 phone and would like to try the bar code scanning software from NeoMedia. I could not find the software to download from the PaperClick site. Does anyone have the link?

  3. em-brof says:
    2003-10-07 at 18:28

    Bar Code Reader in Every Man’s Hand
    Soon, very soon, given the progression of camera phones, we will all have a bar code reader in our pocket….

  4. Agents, Java, Workflow, KM..@www.Guruness.com says:
    2003-10-18 at 19:57

    Palm and Java combo
    WebSphere Micro Environment (WME) Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) certified runtime environment will be available on Palm handhelds (good for them!).

    Now Java developers can use Tungsten devices to create Palm handheld Java applications (competition

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