That came in via a google alert on semapedia:
“Scanbuy, a global leader in mobile marketing solutions, today announced that it has secured a global agreement with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. to preload the ScanLife mobile 2D barcode application on Samsung’s camera phones.”
CEO Jonathan Bulkeley of Scanbuy went so far as to call the agreement a
“watershed moment for the 2D barcode market.”
Watershed moment? Lets have a look, their Readers read their very own EZcodes, where is watershed here? You have to pay money for the creation of codes, more a moneyshed from you. QR Codes and Datamatrix are free, you can create as many codes as you want to for $0. And I believe you even have to pay for code usage. EZcodes are indirect, they don’t encode an URL but an unique ID that is resolved on their server to a URL and then send back to the user, very old school, just encode the URL please like you do for QR Codes and Datamatrix, straightforward and no added point of failure, when scanbuy is down so are the codes. That is by design. Also QR codes can be easily created in every environment, their are libraries for java, ruby, .net, python, you name it, so very easy to integrate, not so with EZcodes, creation always needs go through them, they own the numbers encoded in the barcode. They claim national and international interoperability via their centralized system, URL are interoperable by design and even decentral.
So to sum it up, expensive, proprietary, less stable and harder to integrate into processes. Hardly a watershed. Lets be nice as well, they work well on very low quality cameras, but we write the September of 2008 and not 2004. Cameras these days in phones are top notch and getting better every day.
So why does Samsung who creates modern handsets like the succesful Samsung Instinct use such a backward code system that certainly won’t spin off innovative projects from mobile entrepreneurs, to get a revenue from barcode usage? hardly, to show how innovative they are, hardly, barcodes are not such an unusual sight anymore, the last esquire had a big and loud ralph lauren QR code ad.
A company like Samsung should be a rolemodel and push for open standards, without open standards I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this post.
Edit:
Of course read that one here as well about CTIA and Scanbuy:
http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=1148
Last weekend we went for a family trip up north to Detroit. It always confuses me to see such a large and important city in such state of decay in a nation that calls itself the leading country of world, clearly not, not when the nation lets a city on that scale rod to its bones. Burned down family houses en masse, car wrecks, factory ruins, the ghostly train station and abandoned sky scrappers. Desolate and depressing. The more important that it has people like Tyree Guyton who started with his Grandfather the Heidelberg Project. He uses empty lots and abandoned houses as canvas for his uplifting, inspiring and positive art. The radiation of hope can be felt all around it. It was a pleasure talking to him and I feel very honored that he put a semapedia sticker on his work. Ein Man der Tat.
