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Experts identify “lactose intolerance” as the inability to digest lactose, a sugar found in milk. About 15 – 25 percent of Germany’s inhabitants show an allergic reaction to milk and other dairy products. Even the best doctors haven’t been able to develop a remedy for this form of food allergy. Most people incorrectly assume that lactose is only in milk and other dairy products like cheese, yoghurt, or cream. But lactose can even be hidden in sausage, sauces, potato chips, fruit drinks, and other seemingly innocent foods. As a result, there are many people who have to read laboriously through each and every list of ingredients while they’re food shopping.

barcoo is now making life a whole lot easier for those users: in cooperation with the newly launched lactose intolerance portal Laktonaut, we’ve just added information on the lactose content of over 8,000 products – and that number is growing every day. It is only a clear indication that can quickly assure you whether a product is safe to be consumed.

barcoo Laktonaut

If you have any further questions about lactose intolerance or other food allergies, we’d be happy to hear from you anytime.

Although they’ve been declared dead time and time again, QR codes are in the midst of a small renaissance. They’re popping up on more and more posters, at bus stops, and in advertisements. For some people they’re eyesores; others think they’re printing errors. Yet more and more people are pulling out their smartphones and “scanning” them. Websites and short messages are encoded in these little squares – and apps like barcoo can display them in a browser within a split second. Since you don’t have to type in any URLs or web addresses, you save precious time and can even access them later.

Here at barcoo we’re also assisting publishers of QR-Codes. We’re creating print templates for the German Yellow-Page conglomerate and are offering an interface for evaluating scans and accessing websites.

Kabel1’s ad campaign with QR codes generated by barcoo (detail)

The following list contains some valuable tips on gaining and securing customers using QR codes.

Success factors:

• Get people excited. Offer more: It’s not enough to just print the company website as a QR code. Potential customers will only scan it once at the most. Link it up to background information or a special product page.
  It’s best to display QR codes at bus stops and train stations. Many people pass the time in those places with their iPhones or Android phones. Once they scan your QR code, you have their undivided attention.
• Offer clear instructions: Make the customer want to scan your QR code. Make your message clear and meet their expectations. Keep in mind that a poster’s essential information should be visible at first glance – because many customers don’t know what to make of the QR codes. If necessary, include short instructions and recommend an appropriate QR code-reader. Since barcoo has a market share of 85% of all barcode-scans in Germany, there’s already one less hurdle for customers. Depending on how the customer base has been established, it may be useful to print an additional abbreviated URL.
• Track scans and requests: Every campaign requires its metrics. A QR code’s success is particularly easy to track. That’s why you shouldn’t refer directly to the target URL, but to a redirecting URL that tracks how many people have accessed it. QR-generators like barcoo automatically offer this function. Each poster can be tracked individually, if desired.
• Don’t neglect design and usability:QR codes do not necessarily need to be black and white. As long as the colors provide a strong enough contrast, the codes can also be other colors. Small design elements like logos can also be placed inside. When printing a QR code, it’s important to make sure it’s within easy reach. Customers probably don’t want to stoop down or contort their wrists to scan a poster at the bus stop.When printing QR codes, it’s important to note the minimum printing size. The rule of thumb, regardless of a barcode’s complexity, is: the scanning distance divided by 10 is the minimum size.
• Print once – check twice: Even though you can always change the target URL later, it’s still better to use your smartphone and physically test all QR codes yourself when using a URL redirection service like barcoo.

Common mistakes:

• Making QR-Codes overly complex and large: Several companies save very long URLs with parameters as QR codes, which is a bad idea because QR codes then get more detailed, require more printing space, become more difficult to scan, and take longer to recognize. barcoo’s QR service prevents this by shortening the URL, but you can also use a service like bit.ly.
• Linking to non-optimized websites: Even with average connection speeds, target pages should load quickly on any standard smartphone, e.g. iPhone, Android, and Samsung bada. Videos should only be in standard formats and not exceed one minute. Flash is a no-go!
• Using incorrect encoding: Special characters in URLs are considered taboo because they aren’t always compatible. All QR codes should use the international, UTF-8 encoded characters.
• Directly encoding addresses or dates: This is only supported by a limited number of QR-reading apps. On top of that, QR codes are getting too complex. It’s better to offer a mobile landing page that recognizes the device and then potentially offers to import an address or a date.

Feel free to contact us whenever you have questions about QR codes. Our research shows that we have a market share of 85% of all barcode-scanning in Germany, which means that the chances are very high that barcoo will be used to scan your QR codes anyway.

barcoo took a look at the scan habits of Android and iPhone users and decided to compare both to each other. While both Android and iPhone users in Germany seem to thrive on Nutella as their breakfast spread of choice – the differences are pretty interesting.

Aside from keeping product and price information as up-to-date as possible, barcoo also strives to keep the application’s technology on the cutting edge. In recent weeks, we treated barcoo’s core to an upgrade to Ruby on Rails 3. While our programmers primarily reap the benefits of the upgrade, you’ll profit from it, too, since we’ll be providing you with several significant new features in data security and performance.

Current security standards for barcoonauts

Reports about hacker groups like “Anonymous” or “LulzSec” are popping up more and more frequently in the media. Such groups have made it their duty to break down the security measures of existing server systems and then publish stolen customer data on the internet. By using new technologies (on the server’s and client’s ends alike), we are already keeping our security measures as strong as possible: it’s too often the flaws that have been around for years in outdated server systems that hackers end up exploiting.

New flexibility for more performance

The upgrade to Rails 3 is able to reduce the server load via its modular construction and by optimizing operations among the various internal processes. This enables us to process more new user requests at once, which is particularly important when the amount of requests drastically increases during a typical “rush hour” (e.g. Saturdays). While that may not noticeably improve the application’s reaction time at average operating hours, it affords us much more flexibility for new optimizations. One way we’ll do this in the future is to bundle many separate data packets into one big packet. That saves on key kilobytes and makes a noticeable difference in the performance of mobile terminal devices.

New basis for exciting technologies

Regardless of our company schedule at any given moment, our developers always have the possibility of exploring exciting new technologies. That’s reason enough for us to have a modern and open working environment. The members of barcoo’s team freely exchange their ideas about new technologies with each another all the time. In recent weeks, for example, we had presentations about Git, Prediction API, NoSQL/MongoDB, Reverse Proxy Caching with Squid and CoffeeScript. Only after discussing matters openly with one another do we decide about whether it’s possible to use such technologies for new features within barcoo. As the engine under barcoo’s proverbial hood, Rails 3 has brought our basic framework up to the highest technological standard. So we are looking forward to new challenges and solutions that will promote the further development of the app.

Are you a Web developer who believes in beautiful code? Then check out our current job openings. Our favourite activity is to sit outside on the grass at Engelsbecken (literally, “Angel’s Pool”) – just a two-minute walk from the barcoo office – in Berlin Kreuzberg and think about new technological and content-related strategies. Contact us if you feel like taking part one day!

There are various classifications of visual impairment. barcoo has received calls and emails from many visually impaired people who report that they use barcoo to identify products while shopping and at home. How does that work? The right-hand image below (taken from Digit-Eyes, a “competitor” specializing in visual impairments) shows how some consumers see products:

© Digit-Eyes

If one can’t see labels or colors, how can it be possible to tell which package contains, say, dog food? barcoo makes it possible. Since many visually impaired people still manage to find the barcode, once they do, the smartphone reads barcoo’s results out loud – including the name of the product, of course. And since we don’t know of another database in Europe as comprehensive as ours, the chances of getting a hit are extremely high.

In case you don’t know how to use it, here is the instruction for activating such functions on an Apple iPhone. In general, we encourage you to let us know if you use barcoo in an unconventional way because it’s your experiences that help us keep pushing barcoo forward.

A few months ago we integrated the carbon footprint calculator into barcoo for (selected) categories. And so our next step is as difficult as it is obvious: to feature the carbon footprint calculator for specific products. Some manufacturers believe it’s not worth spending so much money on collecting the data necessary to do that. They would rather put their money into directly into reducing CO2 emissions. But when they do that, there’s no way to measure how much “good” it’s actually done. At any rate, they believe that it has a positive impact. But we believe, for the medium term, that measuring CO2 emissions in an exact way is not so costly and will lay the foundations for controlled CO2 reduction.

In 2009 Frosta became the first food manufacturer in Germany to participate in the Product Carbon Footprint project. Since then, the company has assessed the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions expended as a result of its products. They traced the entire production chain for each of their frozen foods, factoring in raw material production, transportation, storage, processing, distribution, retail, and usage (the consumer’s shopping trip, preparation, washing). Based on the results for most of the products, they could determine that raw materials make up the highest portion of CO2 emissions (about 50%), while further processing and manufacturing logistics make up about 20% and the consumer is (on average) responsible for about 30%.

When you scan the Frosta products in question, you’ll be provided with information about its carbon footprint, from its supplier to its consumer, in grams. We encourage all other manufacturers to provide us with their CO2 information for individual products so we can integrate them into barcoo.

We are often asked to what proportion the various mobile operating systems are represented by our users. The last statistic is nearly one year old, so it’s now time for an update. Below is the evolution of the various mobile platforms at barcoo:

You will have noticed the striking Samsung bada dent in the middle of last year. This is due to the fact that we supported bada from the start, that the Samsung devices sold well and that their app store was pretty empty. Therefore users downloaded most of the few apps available to them in the store. This temporary high market share could not be kept indefinitely. With a current overall market share of 5%, but nonetheless increasing steadily, the bada platform should still remain of interest to some app developers.

Nokia Symbian is a tragedy (see analysis by Tomi Ahonen). From August 31st, barcoo will cease supporting Nokia Symbian. It was a very painful decision: we’ve invested again and again in this platform, but now it’s enough. It’s all over.

In the graph, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry are hardly to be seen. Here also, because of the continued lack of use, we have been compelled to discontinue support for these platforms. We are currently not planning any WP7 or webOS version either. Anyone interested in detailed statistics will find the historical data in Google Docs.

The evolution of the current market share, compared to the average for 2010:

No surprises. It should be quite clear where we’re heading. Or not? Nokia will be (most likely) purchased soon. A lot is possible then: Maybe MeeGo after all? Exciting.