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Technology Corner: Prediction for 2010 — cell phones and barcodes

By George Adomavicius
Citizen Journalist

George Adomavicius

I am amazed how many people now have a Blackberry or some other smartphone.

I wonder if they all suffer and curse that tiny keyboard like I do. Those buttons are about one-third the size of my old Motorola RAZR phone, and I got pretty good at texting on it.

Now, I often type in my password wrong or mis-key my search argument in Google. Thankfully, for dialing, the number lookup only needs the first few characters. H-O for “home” is enough to call up my home number.

What technology improvement could make these devices less frustrating and more productive for us? In the corporate world, one of the most respected companies in information technology analysis and consulting is the Gartner Group. Fortune 500 companies respect its predictions and vendor analyses, and vendors vie to get the best ratings on a Gartner report.

The Gartner Group makes an annual top 10 technology prediction — advice for businesses to help them formulate their future IT plans and budgets. It can be interesting to look at those and speculate how those technology directions will affect us as individuals.

Coming in at No. 6 on the top 10 prediction list is mobile applications:

(To view the entire prediction list, visit gartner.com.)

There’s no mention of frustrating keypads. I haven’t used an iPhone, but I imagine I would find the touch screen also fat-finger sensitive?

I’d like to add a little more to that Gartner prediction. There is a technical add-on I expect will catch on soon to cell phones in North America that will provide some new and explosive capabilities: the barcode.

This UPC code is on virtually every product, and pricing and checkout in stores have never been the same. This barcode has also improved supply chain and material handling. Those codes are on cases, cartons and pallets in warehouses. Airlines use them for baggage handling.

Because almost all cell phones have cameras now, it is not hard to put a barcode reader in that same packaging.

And if that could be done, what might be the application?

A camera captures the code, sends it up to a computer via a wireless Internet connection, and a related application or appropriate data stream is sent back to your phone.

In Japan, with a cell phone, you can scan a barcode at the train station and get the latest train schedules displayed. No need to congregate around a screen and squint at a list, hoping it has the latest info.

Just like barcodes are put on products for retail purpose, largely for price lookup and inventory management, a barcode that your cell phone could read could trigger your device to go to a related Web site, with product or promotion information, without you having to key in anything more.

That is also already occurring in Japan.

A for-sale sign for a house could be scanned to get the asking price. Menu items at a fast food outlet could be scanned for nutrition information. Self-checkouts in grocery stores have introduced us to self-scanning. Scanning a barcode with a cell phone would be much easier than typing something into it.

So there you have it, my prediction of the next big change to mobile applications: Devices will be advanced with barcode readers, and our lives will be enhanced even more with applications based on that technology.

And I hope we’ll see that in 2010. I hate that tiny keyboard on my smartphone. It makes me feel dumb.

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