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N. Nagaraj

Technology will, in the near future, help you do some comparison-shopping, be it for imported diapers or jeans, with just your camera-phone. Here's how.

YOUR friendly neighbourhood shopkeeper is going to throw a fit when you tell him about this: that you want to scan the barcode on that packet of imported diapers with your camera-phone and check out if he is really offering the lowest price that he always says he offers.

If it is really true that technologies in the US make their way to India quite quickly these days, then you could be having such a conversation with your neighbourhood retailer in about a year's time.

Scanbuy Inc, a US-based company, has launched ScanZOOM, a software application for mobile phones fitted with cameras that will help with comparison-shopping. All you have to do is take a picture of the product's barcode and the software will automatically pull up prices for the product from PriceGrabber (www.pricegrabber.com) and Amazon (www.amazon.com) .

And just in case you were wondering about ambient light conditions, focusing, perspective, shear, shadows and other problems associated with photography, the company says that its application takes care of all these problems by employing some unique error-correction modules. The software is available for 16 models of camera-phones at the time of writing. Scanbuy also offers an add-on lens for capturing the barcodes right.

The software is available not only for camera-phones but also for PDAs (personal digital assistants) and PCs. On the PDA, it can be used for tracking inventory. On the PC, one can perform comparison-shopping by using a standard webcam. The PC version automatically links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com and Froogle.

While it seems at first glance that retailers will not relish their customers using this product, it also offers a lot of potential to the retailers to benchmark their prices with the rest of the world. It can also be used by the retailer to try and convince customers why his prices are the best (service options, proximity, shipping costs etc.). If the retailer can get into some kind of arrangement with companies such as Scanbuy, he can even integrate the application with his back-end software to collect and process an order.

Some retailers already prohibit photography using camera-phones within their stores. More retailers may join this bandwagon in the near future, but eventually, they may have to let people scan for barcodes simply because customers may stop using the stores with the simple reasoning that "if he is hiding his prices, then he is probably not giving me the best price". Also, if it is not a just-launched product, the customer can scan the code from an already purchased product borrowed from a friend.

Meanwhile, search engine google is testing its google SMS service at www.google.com/sms/ but the service is available only in the US as at the time of writing. The "Prices from Froogle" service lets you search for prices across the Web by just sending as SMS. Let's say you want to buy an iPod, you just send "prices ipod 20gb" to 46645 (googl). Whatever you are looking for, just include the word price or prices in the SMS. You can also use the letter "f" as in Froogle as a shortcut for the word prices.

The new Google SMS service is not all shopping and price comparison. You can look up business listings and residential listings, for starters. You can also look up definitions by sending an SMS with the word define or the shortcut "d" as in define followed by the word for which you want the definition. You can also use it as a handy reckoner of facts and look up general information. For example, if you want to know the population of Los Angeles, you just have to send the word "g" as in google followed by "population Los Angeles".

Please remember, however, that you are not accessing the Web through the Google SMS service. The results that you get are not links to Web pages. You only access Google's database and the results are plain text messages, typically an answer to your question.

Picture by G.R.N. Somashekar

nagaraj@thehindu.co.in

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