ShopSavvy, Barcode Scanner, and CompareEverywhere are three free shopping applications for Google Android poised to help you find the best deals in town and online.
At their core, they’re nearly identical, using the phone’s camera to auto-focus on a barcode. That barcode is then matched to a product using an open source decoding library, ZXing, that was developed by Google engineers last year.
These services are not perfect and there is much to say about what they don’t do, but what is impressive is that Android is hardly out of the door and there are already a plethora of competing apps. Even more impressive is the vision that developers are showing by putting in such services to phones. This is perhaps and endorsement of what retail in the future will become. i.e., a perfect storm of RFID, smart phones, Internet, and GPS with software and services using these technologies in order to help you make informed purchases at a price that is right for you.
With all this in mind, it isn’t hard to see a future for the likes of PayPal and Google Cart on mobiles. But the real interest for retail will be all the future smart ideas that will take advantage of the fact that their customers are carrying around the perfect communications device in their pocket.
