We’ve been preparing and working on it for months and now it’s finally ready: barcoo launched in the UK and in France! But do these countries really need yet another barcode scanner? Absolutely, because so far barcoo is the only app worldwide to bring cosumers transparency in all dimensions:

- of course (local) price comparison
- product reviews and user comments
- nutritional traffic light system
- sustainability footprint (corporate social responsibility of producers)
- information about fish population and sustainable consumption
- crowdsourcing: you add new products, images and prices using your mobile phones
- Social Elements

And naturally we’re rolling out our platform spanning strategy and launched on iPhone, Android, Nokia and bada right from the beginning. Bonjour la France – Hello UK! Spread the word.

We’re sticking to our multiple platform strategy. Since Samsung launched bada, a potentially successful mobile (and proprietary) operating system, barcoo is immediately available for bada! Eventhough right now there’s only one korean ocean mobile phone available (the relatively inexpensive and highly praised Wave S8500) several more have been announced, i.e. S5250 Wave 2 and S5330 Wave 2 Pro.

barcoo is easily installed via Samsung Apps (in a few days also in France and UK). And thanks to the fast processor scanning is really fun, by the way. There are some little issues with unofficial firmwares, we’re still trying to fix.

For all developers out there: Programming for bada went pretty smooth. Obviously not as many tools and practical values as for iPhone are available, but it is less complex than Symbian.

WeGreen has updated and extended the Sustainability Footprint (and it will be available in UK and France soon on barcoo). We now include even more sources of information about companies’ CSR performance. Since the first launch in March, a couple of new sources have been researched and bundled, for example the “Black Book on Brand Companies“, the “Brandoscope“, an independent sustainability index, or the “Tomorrow’s Value Rating“. Brand new is the “CSR- Company Check“, a rating by the German Consumer Initiative.

Furthermore we updated all of the other sources and adjusted some of them. As a result, you can now access the newest version of the “Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics” and meanwhile the whole report of the “German Sustainability Report Ranking“- results are available for you. However, two sources had to be removed, as they did not full fill our up -to –dateness regulation of two years and the institutions won’t continue their ratings in the future. You can find a complete list of all the sources on the WeGreen- facebook- page.

In dialog with the organizations and institutions behind the sources, we made some slight adjustments. For the source “Rank a Brand” we decreased the green and yellow threshold from 66% and 33% to 60% and 30% respectively. The “Sustainability Report Ranking” is not rated after the companies rank anymore but after the level of points achieved. From 66,6% of the possible points on a company receives a green light, from 33,3% on a yellow light For “Brandoscope”, a company needs to be certified in a least two of the ten sustainability areas to receive green now.

All together we connected over 2.000 companies with multiple million products. Meanwhile, you can research companies independent from any product search with barcoo. If you are interested in the Sustainability Footprint of companies outside the consumer goods market, you can find this information at http://www.sustainabilityfootprint.eu.

Sorry, this post is not available in English. It’s about the possibility of ordering food with barcoo in Germany now. That’s quite cool for Germans as they are definitely not as used to food ecommerce as the British or the Swiss for example.