Amazon Japan Offers Barcode Purchases via Camera Phone

Zode writes "Jesse James Garrett reports that Amazon Mobile Japan customers can purchase a item with their camera phones. "Snap a photo of a product bar code using your cell phone, and Amazon Japan will give you a price check," according to Garrett, relaying from this article in Ketai Watch (Wireless Watch). Here's the English translation from Babelfish."

Available in America...

[Barbarian]

...in 6 years. That's how these things tend to go.

also 4th post.

Far Out indeed

[Desiderata]

That's amazingly far out. It sounds like something from a scifi movie... but it could turn out to be useful. I doubt my camera phone can take such clear pictures (hey, I have trouble recognizing myself) but all things are possible in Japan. Just out of curiosity (the Babelfish article did NOT make sense) would this mean that while buying something at a shop, you would realize it's cheaper on Amazon? I don't know, taking into account shipping and the 1-2 days wait for products, I would just buy it at the store while it was right in front of me.

Great for Froogle, Pricewatch + feature request

[Raindeer]

Great that this idea is being implemented.I have thought of fiddling with the Dutch equivalent of Pricewatch and Froogle on my Treo 600 in a store to see for instance what a certain keyboard would cost elsewhere. In the end I ended up with searching online first for what I wanted and just recording the prices on a paper list. (envelope scraps are just so passe)

I would like to add a feature request. Could they hook it up to the review sections as well, so that it becomes possible not only to see how much it costs elsewhere, but also if people like it at all. Even nicer would be if it could turn into some augmented shopping list, complete with tips like If you buy this, you will need that etc.

I don't know how the situation is in Japan...

[Advocadus Diaboli]

... but in my county you have to pay money to send photos from a cell phone to someone. So instead of spending my money on products I'm asked to spend my money on getting the price for the products? That looks quite strange to me. :-)

possibilities

[nilbog]

So camera phones can be used as barcode scanners, eh? I wonder how long until we see this in a wider usage. I mean, why buy an expensive laser reader when any cheap camera will do?

I would personally like to see the ability to scan a barcode and see results on your phone for what the product is going for on different online retailers (think froogle).

Also, does anyone remember those scannerz games where you would go around scanning barcodes to create monsters to fight with? That would make a killer cell phone game!

Nice idea

[lintux]

This is the first time that I actually see a sane reason to have a camera in a mobile phone. They're too crappy for taking real pictures, they increase the weight of the phone by 25%, more and more places are banning cam-phones... But at least now you can use them to buy stuff at Amazon. ;-)

I wonder if they patented this...

Mac people using this already...

[nordicfrost]

The good folks at Delicious Monster [delicious-monster.com] have the Delicious Library [arstechnica.com] where you can use your iSight or other camera to scan your DVD library barcodes for ease of use. Quite pornographic.

Re:Purchase from ADs ?

[Eric Giguere]

This is the next step from applications that exist today. For example, J2ME-enabled phones can run Piranha Pricecheck [mpowers.net]. I even wrote up a simple book price check application [ericgiguere.com] that I was going to use for an article but never went too far with it.

This stuff is quite easy to do with Amazon's web services [amazon.com]. On a mobile phone, oddly enough, the ISBN [ericgiguere.com] is also really easy to enter from the keypad, since it's all digits except for the trailing X that sometimes occurs (modulo 11 check digit) and you can infer that.

Eric
See what your browser is sending [ericgiguere.com]

Re:QueCat

[cra]

I'd like that, too! And with bar codes on invoices and stuff Internet-bank users like myself wouldn't have to manually punch the account numbers, names, KID-numbers and such if both the phone and the PC has BlueTooth. Which they do. :-)

isbn

[zozzi]

or how about you just sms the isbn number printed below the hard-to-scan ( no dammit that's not the book I want ) and obtain the same thing????

Re:OT: Re:What about the bookstores?

[treerex]

While this is true (I have several Murakami Haruki novels that are physically small and split into two volumes) you also see books like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone which is, at least in hardback, a single volume. South Korea also does this: my copy of the first Harry Potter is published in Korean in two soft-bound volumes.