Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Feb 2002, cfb wrote:
> [...]
> So building a loyalty program in a country in which they are
> extremely popular, and using a common--if not commodity--technology
> at the POS side doesn't seem odd at all. I'm rather suspecting
> other reasons for the failure.
Yes... either finicial or technical failure. I suspect that it was
a victim of the statistics that it gathered or possibly some sort of
fraud based failure (and to get a good idea of why "read only",
consumer writable tokens fail, all you have to do is look at this
past christmas season's massive "gift card fraud" in the states).
> > Bar codes on displays... kinda' like cupons on the web?
>
> Again, loyalty programs can make the difference here. When you've
> got someone registered already, and the discount comes with a simple
> swipe of a barcode, the effort on the part of the consumer is much
> less than the payback, and so it can catch on.
You don't have to tell me about point cards... of the multitude
of point cards I have, only one has a barcode (Good Will) and the
rest have a number or mag stripe (or both). I'd rather have a
uber-point-card in the form of an RF ID tag on my key chain that
worked across multiple stores... I suspect that this might not
be very compatiable with stores' loss control systems, but I'd
use it a lot more
...and I have been known to use a web coupon every now and then.
> [...]
> I could actually see this being really, really big in Japan, if
> only enough people here had computers.
...or keitai (that were as useful as GP computers)?
> > A general purpose scanner would be cool. A specialized barcode only
> > laser scanner would be stupid. Barcodes are not nearly ubiquitous as
> > one might think.
>
> What do you mean by that. I.e., where do barcodes need to be that
> they aren't now, and what makes them hard to put there?
Humm... time to apply the old "wallet check" test (pulls out wallet
and thumbs through all the non-monitary ephermia). Discovery?
Three seperate types of barcodes (one 2D barcode)... and on the
"point card" used the most? none. Percentage of things having
a barcode? <20%. Ratio of mag stips to barcodes: 2/1.
Things I want barcodes on?
In my wallet (items the didn't have barcodes):
reciepts (bank reciepts and POS reciepts)
point cards
IDs
fare cards
telephone cards (some had barcodes, some did not)
business cards (oohhhh, I know, big faux pas)
the wallet itself
In real life?
every mass printed document.
bus stop maps
television shows
audio CDs (not just the paper in the jewel case)
whois entires
clothing tags (do I need to dry clean this thing?)
I could go on and on, but I think you're beginning to get the idea.
> Barcodes are ubiquitous on anything sold in a shop. I can't imagine
> that any medium-to-large retailer with a POS system would ever
> stock something without an EAN-13 on it; the cost of dealing with
> it would be just too high.
Yes, well, until upc-barcode.org finally comes on-line, offering the
individual consumer to acutally make use of the barcodes they run
across in their every day life, barcodes are going to be corporation
mediated experiments in consumer adoption failure. I.E. barcodes are
currently designed and deployed to help companies solve inventory and
stocking issues... which is at least twice removed from the consumer.
> And the cost of getting barcodes on to
> somewhat-to-very ephermial printed matter (advertisements, loyalty
> cards, etc.) is very, very low.
I would change that to "the cost of getting barcodes on [...] mass
printed matter". Currently, the non-usefulness and cost of getting
barcodes on (any) printed matter is so high that there is almost
zero demand for it.
> [...] it will virtually never produce an error, and
> require a rescan a reasonably small percentage of the time.
That may change when you start talking about news print, television
and other non-traditional barcoded media.
> General purpose scanning, on the other hand, is a lot more expensive,
> a lot less reliable, and is useful for what?
Useful for what? Scanning documents who's dead-tree edition I really
don't want to hang onto... and in FAX-centric Japan, scanning is a
communications medium in and of itself.
> I own a portable
> general purpose scanner (a C-Pen, but I've also used the competing
> one whose name escapes me at the moment, "Q-something"?), and I've
> got to say the barcode scanning ability of it seems to offer far
> more than the text scanning and OCR. (If you're in Tokyo and want
> a personal demonstration of the difference in reliability and ease
> between barcode scanning and generalised scanning, drop me an e-mail.)
Nobody uses general purpose scanning for OCR... everyone already knows
it's a complete waste of time when a simple FAX or e-mail PDF attachment
will suffice. Barcode recognition from digital camera snaps would be a
far more interesting, relivant and low-cost experiment.
> Anyway, bar code scanners should definitely be in keitai. Just to
> keep this on topic for the list. :-)
I can't think of anything more useless to clutter up the form factor
with. When some smart cookie realizes that the keitai is the *perfect*
device to turn into a bluetooth access point/hub (dropping out to
ethernet on the recharging station), then *maybe* a barcode scanner
might be a nifty accessory to add on to a key chain (and I'd say that
it would be far better to have an tunable RF ID tag built into the
bar code/bluetooth transmitter)
Received on Sun Feb 10 12:45:34 2002