Masabi Mobile Barcode Tickets -but why use another standard?
We wrote about this earlier this week Masabi Train tickets: http://www.gomonews.com/masabi-win-contract-to-provide-mobile-ticketing-for-all-uk-train-services/
I slightly disagree with this particular barcodes article as I read in dread that Masabi is actually talking about creating a “NEW” standard.
Now, GoMo News has made its position on standards clear. Only one is needed for the whole mobile code industry. So why create a new one for train tickets?
In reading the press release, Cian’s article and the Masabi response I think that this service is just in the trial phase anyway. If so, then the press release is slightly misleading. While it is good that train tickets will be barcodes - the barcodes MUST be readable by universal barcode readers or at least 2D barcode readers that are on Nokia devices.
While we wish Masabi well - we contest the need for more standards in an already confused mobile code industry bieng held back by hungry capitalists fighting for the good of their own needs and not the ecosystem.
After writing about Jonathan MacDonald and his Every Single One of Us movement - I am tempted to take the bull by the horns and do the same for the mobile barcode market. The OMA, GSMA and definitely CTIA are simply not doing enough or riding on the same train as the rest of the industry.
Related News:
- Masabi win contract to provide mobile ticketing for all UK train services
- Mobile ticketing update: Air France KLM rolls out more mobile tickets after successful trial
- Sprint 2D Mobile Barcode Solution Scanbuy
- MobileTag, the AFMM and French Mobile Barcode Standardisation
- Magnet Harlequin- another pea in the mobile barcode and visual mobile search pod?
Hi Bena,
Your push towards a single bar code standard for the mobile industry is justified and useful. But what type of bar code is really needed by the mobile industry?
Recently vendors have been fighting to get their own 2D code format adopted as broadly as possible (and unabashedly used your forum as one of their battlefields, to our reading pleasure), in order to put a stake in what they see is going to soon become a multi-million Dollars industry.
However, as you have documented in several posts whose significance might have been lost to some, there is one organization out there that, because of the sheer size (and nature) of its membership, pretty much has become the de facto standards body for bar code reading: GS1.
You have documented the GS1 recommendations recently. Beyond UPC / EAN 13, they include Datamatrix and QR codes (2D). That’s the current state of the art, and players looking at short-term 2D projects should stick with these unless they want to carve themselves a very small niche out of the market.
However the GS1 paper also includes a mention of the GS1 DataBar (more here http://www.gs1.org/productssolutions/barcodes/databar/). This next-generation 1D bar code is aimed at replacing UPC / EAN 13 at POS and everywhere in the commerce chain. And it includes features that were not supported by its predecessor, such as the ability to uniquely identify an item (as opposed to just a product, which can exist in millions of items with the same 1D bar code identifier). Because it enables traceability and uniqueness, it makes the main value of the 2D bar code in the commerce value chain moot. And because there is very little doubt that GS1 members will choose a new code that preserves significant parts of their infrastructure investments (1D DataBar) against one that requires a major upgrade (2D), 2Ds are likely to end up serving only a few niche applications.
COnsequently, there is a significant probability that, by investing in “current” 2D technologies and not in GS1 future compliance, the mobile industry might drive itself out of a major significant revenue source, an order of magnitude larger than what it is currently aiming at. If CTIA and European carriers do get their act together and reach some level of critical mass in the adoption of 2D bar codes, they will undoubtedly manage to create enclosed ecosystems of a limited size. But shouldn’t he mobile industry be more ambitious? Shouldn’t we all take aim at the billions of products that will continue to bear 1D bar codes for the decades to come?
By excluding 1D bar code decoding from its scope, I think that the CTIA has been short-sighted. And by focussing their R&D efforts on high-end phones reading 2D bar codes, vendors are probably jeopardizing their future position and revenues.
We need voices now that help drive all of us in the mobile bar code industry towards higher ambitions!
Benoit, very interesting. I am tempted to agree with you - 1D codes are everywhere.
But for me 1D codes are retail and traditional - with 2.0 and more advanced mobile - 2D codes are a sort of mobile revolution.
I think readers including the nokia one that dont read 1D codes are jeapodising the future. I am going to have to tweak my argument to include 1D codes moving forward.
Thanks Bena
Hi Bena,
Masabi has created an open standard, readable by standard 2D barcode scanners, as long as they cope with Aztec, the format favoured by many mobile ticketing applications due to its robustness in reading barcodes displayed on the phone screen, and that it copes without a “quiet zone” around the barcode.
There is no proprietary technology included, and we don’t get paid by people that are using the standard, unless they pay us to develop systems to support it.
We even adjusted the standard to use only standard ascii upper case letters and numbers within the barcode so that it was easier (cheaper) for other integrators to add older scanners into the system without needing to enable binary barcodes, a barrier to some systems.
We’d agree with you that people should NOT add new standards where other standards already exist. In this case there were no suitable standards in this space, so our actions were to strike early and make a cheap and open standard based on internet security standards to prevent more proprietary standards coming in and making unification harder in the future.
(One thing we are not doing here is making barcodes to be read by phones, we are making codes to be displayed on phones, quite a different purpose to QR codes.)
We as dedicated scanner / validation provider for push barcodes (and involved in the Pilot at Marylebone Station that lead to Masabi ) agree to apply to existing standards. Applying to the 3 barcode standard as adopted by the IATA with QR, Aztec and Datamatrix is in our opinion the best possible “standard”. Although 1D codes are all around they are limited in regards to data that can be put into the barcode (EAN/UPC 8 & 13 digits) where 2D barcodes can include far more alfanumeric data, like all the by the IATA demanded data on a boarding card.
QR push codes became the standard in Asia for tickets and coupons, Aztec codes became the standard for train e-tickets in Europe (and is logic now to become the standard in mobile train tickets too) but Datamatrix seems to be the choice of many other industries.
All 3 of them have a high level of redundancy that make reading them easyer. 1D codes have no redundancy.
Reading push barcodes with standard 2D barcode scanners will not result in a acceptable readrate for self-service as we have achieved in Marylebone Station, reading them with a Phone will not lead to satisfying results at all.
Btw. although we are promoting 2D codes because they fit more to the needs of online ticketing platforms and other future sensitive applications we do read 1D push barcodes from phone LCD’s without a problem (as only scanner manufacturer).