There is a report that Toshiba is developing software that will allow people to take a picture of the bar code label of many products, send it to a related service and quickly receive back information related to the product.
The data the service returns? From blogs. Yep, Toshiba will send back summary information on how many blogs gave the product positive and negative reviews. Related product information will also be displayed.
There is no information now about how Toshiba will go about gathering and analyzing blog data, and whether the data will need to be in a structured format or not. It is also unclear as to whether this will initially launch only in Japan or worldwide. I think one of the bigger challenges of the service is pairing the blog data with the bar code.
As the service launches, sometime in 2006, I’ll be all over this if I can get access to it. Products covered are primiarily consumer electronics products, food, books, CDs, DVDs and cosmetics.
Bar codes on about 400,000 products can be scanned.
When the cellphone camera shoots the bar code, the information is automatically sent to a server, which then searches through blogs, or diary-like Web sites, for reviews.
About 10 seconds later, a summary will be displayed on the cellphone screen reporting how many blogs were positive and how many were negative.
The actual comments on the blogs can also be viewed as well as information on related products.
Toshiba categorized about 500,000 Japanese words into fields such as travel and culture, and classified words related to evaluation as good or bad.
The fact that Toshiba is looking to edge, consumer driven content instead of a proprietary database to gather product information is stunning. Two thumbs up. I hope it works.
Comments
sounds like a lot of data to be pushing down to a mobile. good to hear people are still talking about mobile services though.
Could be quite pricey to get the info for loads of products, the web 1.0 version would be a downloadable database on your phone that had all the products and votes held there - update it just before you shop. Maybe that’s better in this case. Integrate it with kitchen appliance that scans the barcode of the food you eat then lets you enter a rating which is uploaded to the database, then you get the opinion of thousands of people.
Wow! This is encouraging. Not sure how they’re extracting positive and negative reviews from unstructured text. This is definitely something that would be easier with structured blogging.
It seems like it may be easier to query comments gathered in amazon, since there is already a standard identifier(AIN) and a API built on web standards. Not to take away from individual blogs but I agree that standards will be needed.
~gt
Scanbuy.com have already launched that kind of product.
I like the idea of physical tagging, it blurs distinctions between the online and offline world which as far as I am concerned can only be a good thing. The whole thing reminds me of semacode, camera readable black and white blobs that could be translated into a url. It seems to be a big task to take one. I would have started smaller with pics of bar codes linking to a greater spec sheet and a small number of user reviews from one site. Trying to collate information from the blogosphere has been notoriously difficult..
We want to contact you to present our platform of geocentric centric and worldwide map data and set up a partnership with Toshiba
Please contact me by mail or phone to
+33 6 11 16 10 10. Best regards
Danièle Drahy
COO
Maporama International
Phone +33 6 11 16 10 10
Didn’t Wired magazine already try something like that with that CAT bar-code reader?
Why not? Isn’t structered blogging having a product review structure? :o)
But before people are able to access that information, how about companies allow us more easily to blog about them? Photos we can take for reviews from different angles, logos in different resolutions etc.
But I will be highly anticipating the usual tests from the blogosphere - I am not sure if Toshiba is aware about the fact what will happen if they bring back ‘beautified’ data. :))
The concept is really neat but not that new in Europe. Bar codes and mobiles have been used for sometime for ticketing and vouchers. Device manufacturers here are also looking at near field ID techniques which may be more robust than the variable picture quality/resolution on the vastly differing range of mobile phones in the market.
Follow the link below for Silicon Valley’s own home brewed answer - nthrum.
http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/g.....id=1296493
A related project:
http://www.shotcode.com/
From the website:
How ShotCodes work
Making ShotCodes is easy! It’ll get you started in the mobile commerce in minutes!The circular sequence of black and white blocks represents a url, any url you want, for example to your products website or a point of sale. The ShotCode reader understands this code and connects the end users mobile phone to your location in three clicks or less! Billions of ShotCodes can be created, enough for all your campaigns and them some!
ShotCode advantages
* Especially developed for use with mobile cameraphones
* Lightning fast, stable and compact client software (~18kb)
* Esthetically pleasing and intriguing design
* Highly recognizable
* Omnidirectional
* Cost effective
* Created and implemented in minutes
* Changes are effective immediatly
I would just like to say how dissappointed I am with the customer service at Toshiba. I purchased A 52″ DLP rear projection TV in march. The bulb blew a short time later. Now it is November, our TV went down again october 17. It is still down. Nobody at customer service has been helpful. This part has been in transit for a week. I am never ever going to but another Toshiba product because of the way I have been treated by the customer service department. this is just my way of telling people how this company works. The customer is only important until the sale is made, then everything else is a fight!
Yes this is very helpful comments.
I love Toshiba products. its world class and one of the best from my experience.
How we can find Toshiba mobile access code.
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