Mobile phones are potentially great for in-person comparison shopping. At Best Buy and want to know whether this product is any good or can be found elsewhere for less? Just pull out your phone, launch the browser, ... navigate to a shopping site ... enter the bar code or model information ...
Well. Not so easy.
However, new product recognition technologies using the camera may make this process less painful. Imagine this:
You visit Best Buy, and see that funny Dyson vacuum cleaner. You want to find out more, so you open your phone and push the camera button. You snap a shot of the vacuum cleaner, and pick "comparison shop" from the list of actions to do next. Your phone immediately sends the image to a server for analysis, and meanwhile loads the shopping application.
When the app loads, it shows all the levels of abstraction: are you interested in vacuum cleaners in general, upright cleaners, upright bagless cleaners, Dyson cleaners, or Dyson cleaners of that model? Pick one, and get a summary of pros and cons, price comparisons, and reviews by users. Order one from the store to be delivered to your home - and the application credits the current location (Best Buy) with part of a sale so they get part of the profit. It may even allow Best Buy to make a special offer to get the product right now and make the purchase directly from the phone, bypassing the line at checkout. Users could also add items to a wish list, or even make an impulse buy of some related item.
This sort of experience would be good for the user, good for the store, good for the carrier, and good for the retailer making the sale. It would not be good for a manufacturer making poor quality products. It would also be excellent for the company enabling the experience, who could charge retailers for higher levels of access, collect valuable user behaviors, and gain some advertising revenue.
What is stopping this system? Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Device manufacturers (and carriers!) have to allow access to the camera application, at least as far as being able to add an action to it. This is not technically challenging, and could provide the carriers with signficant extra revenue from the comparison shopping engine. Retailers have to embrace the phone camera as a useful sales tool, not something to be banned.
Ms. Barbara,
Scanbuy has progressed quite considerably in the past 2-3 years. What do you think about Scanbuy?
What do you think of the Neomedia vs. Scanbuy battles? Which company has an advantage in this moment?
Which company has an advance on the others? Is it too early to claim a winner?
Thanks for your answers in advance.
dlethe01
I have to make a few notes about the business, before I can comment on the design. First, Neomedia claims it holds the patent for scanning a bar code and using it to connect to the Internet (or something like that). Thus, they either have licensed to ScanBuy, or will end up sueing ScanBuy at a later time. I wonder about the business sense of the former option for a small relatively unknown company licensing to another, so I assume that we have a pending lawsuit – that Neomedia will intiate once ScanBuy gets significant leverage.
On the other hand, Neomedia has been acquiring a lot of companies recently. Merging companies takes a lot more than simply signing a document, particularly when you want to combine technologies, products, and practice in a way that generates the oft-cited “synergies”. This makes me think that life inside Neomedia is at best disorganized right now, so they won’t be able to do much more than maintain status quo while they figure things out – and that is likely to take them mostly out of the innovation picture for the next year or so. Of course, next year we may start seeing very interesting things.
From a user experience perspective, ScanBuy looks pretty interesting. They have more visible products. It appears (but I have no proof) that their technology will work slightly better. They have a broader variety of applications, and can thus do more with the same bar code – instead of one company owning the bar code, ScanBuy uses the bar code scanning simply as text input. For example, the “Your Pet” game requires you to “feed” your pet by scanning products. Silly, but similar to several successful iMode applications. PaperClick, on the other hand, has one mapping for a particular bar code. This moves all the intelligence to the server.
If both companies had presence on a single device, PaperClick would be seen as advertising, whereas ScanBuy would be more focused on what the user wanted to do. The suite of ScanBuy applications would provide more options, but also more complexity.
Barbara,
I’ve read your site in the past; and you have written more informed comments about NeoMedia before (see below excerpt) so I’m confused by your comment above, “NeoMedia claims it holds the patent for scanning a bar code and using it to connect to the Internet ( or something like that.). Or something like that rather throws me, based upon your detailed commentary and understanding demonstrated below.
Here’s what you have written previously; your above comments don’t seem to flow ..confusing indeed.
Your comments below, from http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/analysis/physicalintegration/
“PaperClick ??? more than just bar codes
NeoMedia??s PaperClick service marries internet data with real-world objects. Wherever a bar code exists, users can launch an application on their camera-phone, take a picture, and be transferred to the appropriate web site. Taking a picture of a book??s ISBN will direct the user to, for example, the Amazon.com web page for that book. A real estate sign bar code could take the user to a virtual tour of the home. A picture of a consumer electronics bar code could take the user to a page with demos, features, and user guides.
By the way, don??t try to make your own bar code picture technology, unless you use the NeoMedia switch. They??ve got a set of patents, including a few protecting the use of bar codes or other machine-readable codes to look up electronic information.
The beauty of NeoMedia??s business model is that they are monetizing the switch, not the end user applications. Companies can bid for specific bar codes or blocks of bar codes. For example, Amazon.com could pay for all ISBNs one year, but Barnes & Noble might win the bidding war in the following year. A real estate agent could pay for the bar codes for her properties. Sony could pay for bar codes for its products.
As more people use the PaperClick service the bar codes become more valuable, and NeoMedia has finally hit upon a combination of factors to make end user adoption easy. First, users can download the J2ME application to access PaperClick services for free. Second, the only necessary hardware is a camera phone with J2ME MIDP2.
PaperClick application on a Treo 600
PaperClick application on a Treo 600
The bar code technology can also be used to create interactive advertising campaigns, something NeoMedia is actively and successfully pursuing. Any sort of magazine or poster campaign can add a bar code, allowing PaperClick users can visit the site for information, ring tones, coupons, sweepstakes entry, or anything else deliverable via the Internet.
There are other ways to make money with PaperClick. Do you manage a tourist area? If you place a few signs with a PaperClick bar code, users can learn about when this building was built and burned down, what related information is nearby, how to get related souveneirs, how to get anywhere else in the tourist area, and where the nearest bathroom is, all for relatively low costs. The user can keep all this information, especially directions, long after walking away from the sign or kiosk. You can also track users?? interests by their behavior. You can integrate with a service such as Go2online to integrate your tourist area with the larger region, providing users with a nearly seamless integration.
At CTIA Wireless & IT 2004, NeoMedia also announced keywords for sale (their WordRegistry service). While this sounds like yet another Internet land grab, we need to look at it in the light of the PaperClick service. Within the same PaperClick application that allows users to take pictures of bar codes, users can type a word or phrase. The idea is that the PaperClick switch would then take the user to the “correct” web site. Typing “Treo 650″ could take the user to the PalmOne Treo web site, rather than a community site or a sales site. This will work once PaperClick approaches ubiquity. In the meantime, it??s another land grab.
Conclusion
The dream of a virtual-enhanced physical world is one of the guiding visions of the mobile internet. Companies have been waiting a few years to get good location-based services from the carriers, and some have failed during the wait. NeoMedia has taken an alternate path to interacting with the physical world, one based on their deep experience with bar codes. This one may work, and soon. “