Mobile barcodes from StickyBits: making the whole world a message board

Imagine you get a book from the library, and you see someone has written what they though about it inside the front cover. And the next person to borrow it left their opinions too. It’s nice to see what other people thought of the book, but it’s rarely appropriate to scribble your ideas on things. A New York based company called StickyBits wants to use mobile barcodes to allow this, and more practical behaviour – and has just nailed down $1.6 million in funding.

What does StickyBits do?

The physical product of StickyBits are stickers. But on these stickers the company is placing barcodes. Any object can be tagged with a StickyBit by just applying the sticker:

That’s the physical component – the other part of the service is digital. StickyBits has released a free-to-download mobile application for iPhone and Android. Using this app, you can scan any barcode with your barcode and attached some digital content to that barcode. It doesn’t even need to be a StickyBit barcode – the app will let you attach content to any existing barcode. It’s just the that StickyBits barcodes allow you to highlight the fact that there is some content to be accessed here.

What kind of content?

Pretty much anything, to be honest. Once that barcode has been tagged in the StickyBits server, you can do pretty much whatever you like with it. You can attach a simple message to it (like the library book reviews). Or you could attach a video. Or a photograph, or a website. Anything that can be hosted on-line can be attached to a StickyBit.

Once you’ve released your StickyBit into the wild, other people can scan it and see what content you’ve applied. Maybe the cleverest bit of the whole service is that once someone has seen what you’ve attached to the barcode, they can attach something of their own. So they can leave a comment about your video, or their opinions on the photo. Or their response to your review. You can, in effect, attach a message board to anything that a sticker can go on. In order to access that message board, someone just needs to get their hands on that barcode.

Incidentally, it’s not just standard barcodes like that which StickyBits scans. It also does QR barcodes.

What we think?

Reported on VentureBeat, StickyBits has gotten $1.6 million in a recently closed funding round. And while I think this is a genuinely cool service, I have to admit I’m not entirely sure what the revenue plan for StickyBits is. So far, it has given every valuable bit of the business away for free – by necessity, I would argue. As presented, this is like a giant social networking / barcoding service, and people are terribly unlikely to pay for social networking. You can buy the stickers from StickyBits if you want – they sell them on the website in packs of 20 or 60. But since you can generate them for free on the website and download them (like I did for that barcode above), you don’t actually NEED to buy them. If someone is savvy enough to make use of StickyBits, then they’re also savvy enough to know how to print a sheet of stickers. There are some pretty advanced merchandising options on the site – you can get your barcode printed on t-shirts, mugs or business cards. I can see the potential for a service like this in enterprise. The potential of barcodes for tracking and managing cargo is huge, and enabling people who scan that cargo to add messages to it could be of huge use for people who receive it further along the line. Now, seeing as investors have seen fit to put almost $2 million into this company (there was an earlier funding round that rustled up $300,000), it’s obvious that I’m missing something! So I’ve sent an email off to StickyBits to see what the profit plan is – and I’m eager to see the reply.