The Mobile Insider discusses how camera phones that can read 2d codes, and eventually 1d barcodes, will be different than the failed CueCat.
From Mobile Insider The revenge of the Cue Cat
The CueCat was a handheld personal scanning device that was supposed to "inter-activate" print. By reading codes in ads, editorials and flyers, it would pop up corresponding Web pages online. This was supposed to spare us the inconvenience of typing in lengthy URLs and bridge the world of physical and virtual worlds for publishers and marketers.
One U.K. firm, World Forum Research, is stoking the old embers in a new report. With the success of using mobile phones as code readers in Japan and Korea, the company predicts that 70% of U.S. and European consumers will use 2D codes to activate content on their phones by 2009.
These mobile "hyperlinks" will use a visual code, an audio cue or even some sort of touch or proximity signal to pull down to the phone some piece of content or WAP link.
At some point this is going to happen, I have no doubt. But 70% of us using it by 2009?
Handset manuf, wireless providers and packaging companies are already putting the necessary infrastructure in place.
As WFR points out, there are successful trials of the necessary enabling technologies in the U.S., and some systems are already in place in the Asian markets.
The potential here is so monstrous that companies and solutions are just pouring in. That alone is why 2009 seems like an awfully premature target date.
Huh? That statement doesn't make any sense.
I fear the competition and shakeout phase on this one could be huge.
I agree. With all of the players on this list a shakeout is inevitable when Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc implement a code scanning application for the masses. .
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