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.

We’ve just had another sensational couple of months: in July alone, 269,767 consumers installed barcoo! Check out the development of our installations in the last months:

More than two years ago we added the food traffic light to barcoo and so a TV superstar was born. The traffic light was and remains one of our biggest success factors – thanks to all of you barcoonauts who’ve entered over 600,000 nutritional values to date! And that’s why it’s time to step it up a notch. What we’re introducing today is brilliant, though it’s unfortunately not so easy to communicate (that’s why I am not expecting the same communicative pull as we had with the first food traffic light). The current traffic light shows you in a simple and direct way that a product contains, for example, lots of sugar. However, if you scan a piece of chocolate, that’s already pretty self-evident. Thus, the added value of the food traffic light is limited.

That bothered us for quite some time, but now we’ve finally come up with a solution. Now, with just one touch, you can compare a product’s nutritional values with the average nutritional values of ones in the same category. How does this chocolate compare with other chocolates? Is this yogurt comparatively high in sugar or low in fat? Pre-packaged products often contain an excess of salt, which is partly responsible for high blood pressure (a widespread disease in Europe). From now on you’ll be able to find direct comparisons in barcoo.

Which never would have been possible without each of you! Now that you barcoo users are over 3.3 million-strong, you’ve helped us provide one of the best forms of transparent media out there. From this day onward, we’re entering new territory: barcoo has designed and officially released the Food Traffic Light+. Initially you’ll find the traffic light comparisons for each of the following products you scan in: chocolate, snacks, sweets, juices, spread, milk, and other dairy products. Our next expansion level will include all drinks.

We integrated cool information from the new official German food portal lebensmittelklarheit.de in barcoo. Check out the German blog post if you want to.

Okay, so it’s still in an experimental phase. But it’s cool anyway, and that’s why all Android users can give it a try now immediately: We have integrated object recognition into barcoo in cooperation with Deutsche Telekom Laboratories. It’s only a limited test-run for now and works exclusively with drinks. That’s why we need your help. Object recognition is a great thing because all you have to do is hold up your smartphone’s camera to a product, which is then automatically recognized, thus rendering the search for the barcode unnecessary. When starting the Android app you’ll find the following little button on the bottom:

When you click on it, the camera window automatically appears, allowing you to search for bottled or canned drinks and to try and identify them.

Object recognition in barcoo

Since we can’t always find out the exact product immediately, a short list appears from which you have to select the appropriate product. When you do that, you’re helping improve recognition technology. The visual search doesn’t work with character recognition like our peers’ (cool) Goggles (for products) which would “only” iniate a Google search for “rivella” for the example above. When using barcoo, it’s only that specific product by rivella that gets identified. Have fun giving it a try!

barcoo is a great example of the ‘Wisdom Of The Crowds’ concept. Our numerous user-contributed reviews are a good example of this. We will be taking this a step further by launching “Ask barcoo” – a new service targeted at manufacturers and agencies that wish to ask our users a few short questions regarding products. During the initial phase, the service will be limited to Germany, where we have over three million users.

Source: David Sim

Preliminary for our blog readers here our brand spanking new first German TV spot:

The Dioxin Scandal has shocked Germany. Chickens on German farms were eating poisoned feed. This past January when the scandal broke out, barcoo immediately built in a function to detect whether eggs had been poisoned by dioxin. So far so good.

That was a sensible and necessary protective action, but since we want to provide 100% transparency, we’ve teamed up with KAT (Association for Controlled Alternative Animal Husbandry Methods) and built in unbelievably detailed background information: not only can you find out specific information about the origin of the egg, the stocking density, the nests, the feed and the animal’s health, you can even see photos of the chickens that laid the eggs you’ve just looked up using barcoo! This is how it looks:

Photos of laying house and chicken stall

According to one statement, KAT is “the most important supervisory authority in hen keeping and believes in quality and traceability in egg production.” Personally, I’m excited for the next time I go to the supermarket and about that much more transparency. We also invite other producers for whom traceability isn’t a foreign concept to contact us.