The Fair Tracing Project

I spent an agreeable half hour in my local Sainsbury’s last week. Not shopping but scanning. For some years, some smartphones have been able to read barcodes on products from cola cans to newspapers, but it always seemed like a technology looking for something to do. It is ­almost two years since I last tried it out on a Nokia N95. So when I discovered that an on-loan T-Mobile phone embracing Google’s Android operating system had a barcode reader, I thought I would give it another go. Some ­industry ­experts think barcodes have reached a tipping point and are about to take off in the west as they have done in Japan, where more than 70% of subscribers use them. I scanned lots of products simply by clicking on the phone’s barcode application, which produces a box with a line through it. After pointing the box at the barcode, it suddenly latches on to it without any need to click and connects to the internet to download data. This is mostly mundane. I clicked on one barcode and up came Old Jamaica ginger beer. Great, but I could find that out simply by looking at the can. It could have had more data, but the manufacturers have chosen not to exploit it.

Does this mean barcodes are dead? Not at all. The reason is they are now changing from being producer-led to consumer-led. The best example is ShopSavvy, which won Google’s Android Developer Challenge. Having scanned a conventional barcode, it not only searches for the best prices for the same product on the internet but is able to use the phone’s GPS function to discover nearby stores with a better price. That could prove popular with recession-conscious shoppers. If you search for ShopSavvy on search.twitter.com, you can get up-to-date information about current bargains even if you don’t have a barcode reader. I described it as a “conventional” barcode because they are often regarded as yesterday’s technology, having been overtaken by so-called 2D or QR (quick response) barcodes of a kind that have gone ballistic in Japan. As Mobile Entertainment reports this month, they are even on tombstones over there, ­enabling relatives to call up photos and other information about the deceased. Instead of having straight lines of various thicknesses, QR codes are small squares – with lots of data contained in even tinier black squares inside – which, when scanned, take your phone directly to a website or link.

For years I have thought that QR codes could help sustain newspapers and magazines, as you would be able to scan a code at the end of an article to link you directly with an update on it, a video clip or a relevant advert on the web. The Sun tried it over a year ago, and it attracted 11,000 people within a month. This was despite the hassle of downloading the software rather than having a one-click operation with the software already embedded in the phone – as happens with the Nokia and Android models. One of the reasons barcodes haven’t taken off in the UK is that, whereas in Japan the dominant operator in effect imposed a standard, here different companies are peddling their own in the forlorn hope of sweeping all competitors aside. How many times have we heard that before?

Barcode technology is not standing still. Scientists in Australia at Edith Cowan University claim to have developed “dense” barcodes with the capacity to store data for images, ringtones and even video within the barcode itself. So you could point your phone at a dense barcode on, say, the sports pages and “download” a video of a goal to your phone without even going near the internet. Phew. There is a (printed) magazine in Japan called Tada Gets that is composed overwhelmingly of QR codes in various shapes and colours that link to items on the web through your phone. It reverses the paradigm that gives newspaper owners so many sleepless nights. Instead of the web feeding off papers for nothing, punters pay for a ­magazine that battens off the web.