FUTURISTIC GROOVES

Last month, Samsung has launched a new phone, the sph-A800, that uses its built-in two-megapixel camera as a business-card scanner. You take a photo of a business card, and optical character recognition (OCR) software scans the image for text which you can then insert into the relevant fields of a new address-book entry.

The Japanese arm of Amazon, an online retailer, offers a service that allows subscribers to carry out a cheeky price check while browsing a bookstore. Snap a picture of the bar-code on a book or CD, and a quick over-the-air look-up will tell you if Amazon’s price is lower. Japanese consumers can even use the technology to find out how fresh their fish is. Scan the bar-code on its packaging, and a text message arrives in seconds detailing when it was caught, on which boat, and even the name of the fisherman who reeled it in.

The next step is to enable phones to read two-dimensional bar-codes, which are small squares containing an assortment of black and white dots. Although an unfamiliar sight in most countries, such bar-codes are already quite common in Japan, where they are known as quick-response (QR) codes. Many people have QR-codes on business cards, says Mr Fasol, so that their contact details can be quickly uploaded to a phone. Other applications include buying tickets for a concert or listening to a sample song on a CD, just by scanning the QR-code on a poster or a CD case. A code can contain an internet address, and scanning it prompts the phone to load the relevant page. The same technology is being promoted in America by firms such as Scan-buy, in New York, and NeoMediaTechnologies, in Fort Myers, Florida.

Moreover, when travellers scan the code, software on their phones interprets it and calls up a web page providing up-to-the-minute information about when the next bus will arrive. There is no need to key in a fiddly internet address. Semacode has also teamed up with Qwest, an American telecoms firm, to run a series of virtual treasure hunts. Hundreds of children rampage through a city centre in teams, hunting for Semacodes and claiming them by taking snapshots of them.