NEGOTIATING his way across a crowded concourse at a busy railway station, a traveller removes his phone from his pocket and, using its camera, photographs a bar code printed on a poster. He then looks at the phone to read details of the train timetable displayed there. In Japan, such conveniences are commonplace, and almost all handsets come with the bar code-reading software already loaded. In America and Europe, though, they are only just being introduced.

See the full article at http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14257721

Ivan Antipov has been working on some Fair Tracing software for his BSc Computer Science degree. He has written an Android application both for accessing information on the consumer end, and to allow producers to upload information into the FT database. This is a great demonstration of how small-scale farmers could interact with this kind of ethical product information system. You can read more in his report — thanks Ivan!

Junaid Haq has been working for the last year on a Fair Tracing application for the iPhone as part of his MEng computer science degree at UCL. You can now see the results of his work in his report — well worth a read. Thanks Junaid!

“A gravestone manufacturer here is helping bereaved families remember their loved ones with a touch of technology — mobile phone QR codes on tombstones that link to photographs and video clips of the deceased…”

“B2Bpricenow.com is an e-marketplace in the Philippines. Through this on-line market place farmers, fisherfolk and small and medium enterprises can access market prices and trade products. This can be achieved either through their website or by cell phone. Split into two phases, the project began by obtaining content for the site from a variety of agricultural and fishery cooperatives and training them to both access and post products on the website. Through free technical support and hosting by Unisys, B2Bpricenow.com is able to offer its services for free. The second phase is focused on getting these groups connected to the internet and actual transactions occurring on-line.” [see http://www.sustainableicts.org/infodev/B2B.pdf

The Sustainable ICTs site offers quite a few case studies, of which this is perhaps the most related to what we are trying to do, and considerable guidance on embedding projects so that they stick.

Just what can you achieve with a weekend of Social Innovation? After 24 hours of simultaneous hacking, designing and user requirement gathering, our Barcode Wikipedia team came up with a basic prototype system: WIBI.it. This is a simple user interface to a wiki-like system that lets anyone look up a product by its barcode and add information. The system also grabs related tagged photos from Flickr and automatically links to Amazon, price comparison sites, and related blog and review articles.

Tom and Fred managed to integrate some open source code to recognise photos of barcodes taken using Nokia phone cameras, allowing users to look up information directly using their mobile. One of the killer apps we envisioned for this type of system would be in-store price comparisons. If you are looking around shops for say DVDs or a flat-screen TV, wouldn’t it be useful to see what online prices were available at the same time — and click to order? This has the potential to turn most of the world’s shops into exhibition spaces, with the real commerce happening on the Internet.

Thanks to David Wilcox you can watch our team’s presentation at the conclusion of the weekend:

I’m spending this weekend with fellow enthusiasts at the Social Innovation camp in east London. This group of around 60 developers, designers and campaigners have met up to work on technologies that build social capital. One of the six ideas being developed is Barcode Wikipedia, described by the Guardian as follows:

The basic idea is to build a system that lets people quickly identify information about products they find in the shops; particularly things like ethical information, news items about it or reviews. Ideally this would work through a mobile phone – you could snap a photo of your product’s barcode or tap in the numbers and get back information that helps you decide whether it’s good to buy.

I’m trying to feed in everything we have learned so far on Fair Tracing, which focuses more on information from producers, distributors and retailers. Barcode Wikipedia should generate some extremely useful ideas on incorporating user-generated content from consumers into product information systems.

Over 1500 kids and their parents visited Royal Holloway’s Science Open Day this weekend. As part of Fairtrade Fortnight, Dorothea Kleine and Maria-Jose Montero organised the Fair Tracing section ot the event: Kids could vote which of the photos taken of or by our producer partners in India and Chile they found most interesting.

Two internet terminals allowed visitors to test out the Fair Tracing demo, typing in the barcodes from a bottle of Los Robles wine and a bag of Indian coffee. Our partners from Nokia had supplied us with a Nokia N95 which proved a great hit with kids trying out the barcode scanning feature on the Fairtrade chocolate bars we provided…and on the Ribena and Coca Cola bottles they had brought with them.

Maria-Jose had put together four short video-clips from our visit to producers in Chile which we showed in our very own Fair Tracing cinema. In the midst of all the buzz, we managed to have interesting conversations with people about their attitudes to Fair Trade, their own buying behaviour and what they thought of the project. Many expressed a desire to buy ethically but were skeptical about ethical labels and claims, including the FLO Fairtrade label. The issue of where information was coming from was key and there was great interest in the possibilities for alternative information dissemination Fair Tracing offered. Meanwhile, kids were learning about Fair Trade in school and asked for it at home. We gave away lots of free Fairtrade chocolate - in return for over 150 filled-out voting sheets telling us more about what potential consumers would like to see in terms of photo and video material on the Fair Tracing system.