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.

Everybody’s always told to “eat more fruits and vegetables”. But few people stop to ask which fruits and vegetables – and from where (and when)?

Fresh fruit and vegetables from local trees and fields can contain vitamins because they grow and ripen in a natural way. If fruits and vegetables come from countries far away, they get harvested when they are only half-ripe, then treated with chemicals, and then kept cool during the transportation process. That not only has detrimental effects on the food, but on the environment, too, since all of that produces a ton of CO2.

And so we ask: when do fruits and vegetables from our European trees and fields actually grow? As of now, barcoo can give you answers with its Mini-Guide for Seasonal Fruits and Vegetables. When you scan barcodes of packed produce, you can check whether it’s listed in the current season’s calendar. Or if you need a side dish that goes with fish, meat or noodles, scan one of those, and a number of suggestions appear according to which fruit and vegetables are in season (designed by the Verbraucherzentrale Hessen, and for now only available in Germany). Aside from that, barcoo also provides direct links to recipes for fruits and vegetables of your choice.

With barcoo’s new seasonal calendar, it’s super easy to eat healthy and at the same do your part in protecting the environment!