This is just an April Fool’s joke (unfortunately).

It’s one of our biggest and most costly projects so far and we’re particularly proud to announce the offical launch of barcoo store view.

What started out as a vague idea two years ago in a pub in Berlin is available in the barcoo App and on www.barcoo.com starting today.

The thought behind it is as simple as it is ingenious: consumers can not only find any product in a store quickly and easily but can also be navigated through the store according to their shopping list.

To accomplish that we spent two years pushing a specially customized shopping cart through all medium-sized and big stores and took pictures of their inventory.

But it’s not only finding product that barcoo store view focuses on. You can also find out everything about the product and its manufacturer.

You can either scan the barcode or use the built-in augmented reality product recognition to view food traffic light, other barcoonaut’s comments and ratings or see how sustainable the manufacturer operates (meaning how good they treat the environment, society and their employees).

Before launching barcoo store view today we conducted a test period of three months with selected manufacturers. We received some good and some bad reviews, which we take quite seriously.

For that reason we offer a form where manufacturers can register to have their products blurred in the shelf view. The registration period for this begins today and will end on June 30th, 2011.

To activate the barcoo store view module in the barcoo app simply enter “barcoostoreview” in the field for text searches and you will find a new menu item with with the same name.

We look forward to any feedback and are grateful for any suggestions or ideas.

Your barcoo team.

Sorry, this post is not available in English.

This article is only relevant for German readers. It’s about those Clean Labels on food products and that it might mean less transparency often. barcoo in Germany integrated some analysis from one consumer protection organisation.

Thank you very much everybody for using the Scan Hero. We could even inspire a CopyCat close to the Silicon Valley to something similar they call Barcode Hero. But we realized that the Check-In just does not really work for products. You simply have more emotional connection to a bar, than to your shampoo.

That’s why the real social elements of the Scan Hero are now integrated directly at the result page of barcoo and you are finally able to have real discussions about products. The Check-In is history but now there’s the ScanTicker. It shows you which product in which category is most scanned one from you. And we open the treasury and show you which products are being scanned or reviewed live!

• Livescans

  http://www.barcoo.com/blog/wp-content/livescans_en.png

• Topscans

  http://www.barcoo.com/blog/wp-content/topscans_food.png

So there’s no reason any more not using barcoo in the subway ;)

Many barcoonauts have special requirements for a product guide that we would love to fulfill: What food is safe for anyone to eat who has food intolerances or sensitivities such as lactose, histamine, and gluten? Can we integrate shops that offer special diets? A lot of times it is difficult to integrate such data because the information is too fragmented or simply for legal reasons. We also face a similar situation regarding the dietary requirements set by Islam – we would love to integrate a virtual Halal designation – but do not have enough reliable data yet.

If you know somebody that knows somebody that has access to Halal information, ideally on product-for-product level, than please let us know.

Business partners often ask us how the different mobile phone platforms perform on our service. Our strategy was and will be to deliver our services on any platform that is relevant.  Currently that would encompass seven platforms (although some primarily are kept for historical reasons). Through having more than one million installations, the numbers should be relatively representative (at least for Germany).  One cannot keep them uncommented, but when we share the distribution, we gladly share it with you.

Here is the distribution of scans using barcoo in September 2010:

Samsumg bada is extremely prominent. The success we experienced with the launch of barcoo on bada at the beginning of August nearly knocked our socks off. Certainly this is due to Samsung Apps not bustling with as many other high quality apps like other app directories. We are excited to see how this plattform will continue to develop.

Android continues to become stronger with every month and is slowly, but surely,  taking away market shares from the other players. We have had the advantage to be present on the German Android market from Day One in Germany and therefore to have obtained a dream position in this (not very agile) market.  We have neglected the Nokia Symbian platform but we are hoping it’s market share will rise again as soon as our new release (1.5 years after the last one) goes live at the Ovi Store. The new release will not only support more current models but will also greatly improve the user experience.

So much for the lastest information from barcoo metrics.

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.

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.

A few weeks ago we launched the social shopping module “Scan Hero”. It cought on pretty good but functionality was – to be honest – fairly limited. So we decided to up the ante: Scan Hero will be more interactive, more playful and more social! In detail that means:

• Implementation of a scoring system: Each tick will earn you points. For reasons of fair play the score will be reset at the beginning of each week, but you can see top scorer lists and check out who’s more active and who’s the most active (prizes for the most loyal Scan Heros are an option for the future).
• You can now talk to each other. Many of our users asked to be connected to other users and exchange opinions about products or anything else. Your wish is our command.
• In general you’ll get more notifications when there’s news about your Scan Tick. For example, if there are new comments or anybody else becomes Scan Hero of one of you products.
• Since we’re starting to become satisfied with Scan Hero’s functionalities we decided to move the button to use it from the very bottom right to the top of the result screen!

And this is what it looks like as of today (in the next weeks also in UK & FR):

Plus, because we’re gaining every day almost more new Android users than iPhone users Scan Hero has been released for Android just now :) Happy Tickering!