Android Scan 2 Jun 2008

Jeffrey Sharkey's Android Scan software finds pricing and metadata for anything with a barcode. It works like so: You find a product that you're interested in buying - say, in a high street store or at a friend's house - and take a photograph of its barcode using your mobile phone's camera. Android Scan then searches a number of websites - including Amazon.com, Half.com, Barnes & Noble, Yahoo! and a number of local libraries - and returns a heap of interesting data about it. For example, if it's a book's barcode that you've scanned, it willl return the cover art, along with customer reviews from Amazon.com; the addresses of all the brick+mortar stores and libraries in your area that have it in stock; and options for buying it online! Pretty neat, eh?

Sure, this idea isn't a new one (and the app should probably be extended to support the increasingly-popular QR codes). However, it's nice to see how close this technology is to becoming part of our everyday shopping experience.