Can mobile phones read barcodes?

LONDON, UK; BRUSSELS, BELGIUM; NEW JERSY, USA: GS1, a global supply chain standards organisation, known for its barcodes that feature on millions of products sold in retail.

It has membership from over one million companies worldwide, particularly manufacturers and retailers of consumer packaged goods.

GS1 Mobile Com is an industry-wide initiative started by GS1 in June 2007 to investigate the potential of businesses giving consumers access to product information via their mobile phones.

GS1 Mobile Com has released a position paper advising businesses to focus on GS1 standard barcodes for mobile applications. The aim is to prevent fragmentation in the current market for reading barcodes with cameraphones.

The full position paper is available at:  http://www.gs1.org/docs/mobile/GS1_Mobile_Com_Barcodes_Position_Paper.pdf .

Vanderlei Roque dos Santos, eBusiness project mManager, Nestle, co-chair, GS1 Mobile Com work group, said: "This is a major step forward in simplifying the choices manufacturers have to make to start enabling mobile services via their products. It will drive innovation not only on product packaging but across a number of communication channels that brands use to interact with consumers."

Olivier Raynal, innovation mManager, Carrefour, said: "Mobile barcodes are one of the ways that retailers can use to improve in-store experience for consumers. Having standards will make implementation easier and faster, across different markets."

More and more consumers are equipped with camera phones that are technically capable of reading barcodes. As well as the existing barcodes on products packaging (called 1-dimensional or 1D barcodes), new barcodes specifically designed to be scanned by a camera (called 2-dimensional or 2D barcodes) are now becoming available.

Source: PR News Wire