Sorry, this post is not available in English.

Sorry, this post is not available in English.

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.

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’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:

You can find them in detergent additives, mildew removers, all-purpose cleaners, and foot and shoe sprays; in liquid disinfectants, hand gels, towels, and so-called ‘hygienic’ sprays. These days you can even find automatic disinfectant dispensers that use sensor technology. “Many manufacturers have recently started trying to put these dangerous and unnecessary disinfectants back onto the market again.”

Source: Consumer Centre Hamburg

In times of the swine flu and EHEC, many disinfectant manufacturers sense their big chance to sell their products, advertising for the chemicals with promises like removing “99.9% of bacteria – including EHEC germs!” The fact that these chemicals destroy our natural biological balance is never mentioned. Nor is it mentioned how the chemicals harm the environment and can cause allergies and eczemas. The Stiftung Warentest, the National Institute for Consumer Health Protection, and the Robert Koch Institute agree: these disinfectants are “fundamentally unnecessary” in normal households.

Regular cleaning with environmentally friendly cleaning solutions is enough for sufficient cleanliness, and is beneficial to you and the environment. When you use barcoo, we’ll inform you immediately if a product has been classified as “unnecessary” by the Verbraucherzentrale Hamburg (the consumer advice center in Hamburg).

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

Bisphenol A (BPA) is an organic compound with two phenol functional groups. At least that’s what Wikipedia says. Many food containers, cans, beverage bottles, and foodstuffs are made of plastics or plastic lining containing BPA. When you use such products, BPA can potentially be released and cause health risks, such as increasing infertility, and may be linked with diabetes or heart and circulatory problems. Some researchers, on the other hand, don’t agree with that theory. On June 1, 2011, after intervention of the European Union, the last baby bottles made with BPA should be taken off the market. However, BPA is still used in beverage bottles, plastic packaging, and tablewares.

© by inhabitat.com

That’s why we want to give you the opportunity to find out more about the potential dangers and will let you know whether products you’ve selected are BPA-free or potentially contain BPA.

With the newly integrated ScanRank, barcoo shows you how often a product has been scanned in comparison with others. When you use it, you can find out which ranking your favorite beer has or which product is the top scan in the drinks category.

In this way barcoo not only provides information, but entertainment as well. The next time you’re in a group, pick up any old product and have everybody guess how many times the product has been scanned. Then use barcoo to scan it yourself and whoever was closest to that number is the winner! During their most recent outing, the barcoo team members played that game to help make the wait at a Mexican restaurant go by faster. The question was: where does Corona stand in barcoo’s ScanRank? There was a wide range of guesses – from 10 to 100 scans – and in the end, the right answer was 45! The prize for the correct answer was another bottle of Corona.

Give our little game a try with your friends: scan drinks, sweets, or books and find out who’s the barcoo expert of the group!