Thailand has been having serious teething problems when it comes to introducing 3G services to the country. But as legal issues are put behind it, mobile operators in the country are involved in bringing 3G services to market – and they needs to promote it. Enter 3GVision and the i-nigma mobile barcode reader, which is being used for the promotion in Thailand.
Who’s involved?
3GVision is one of the big players in the mobile barcode market, especially in Japan. It hasn’t had as much success abroad, with competitors like NeoMedia and Scanbuy also in the market in the EU and USA, but it’s still a significant player. The i-nigma application, like other mobile barcode readers, can be downloaded to your phone to turn your camera into a scanner. i-nigma surpassed 120 million users in the middle of last year, and the number has increased since.
Then you’ve got TrueMove – one of the mobile operators that is pushing 3G in Thailand. TrueMove is creating a trial service to show people what 3G is capable, and it wants 2D barcodes to be an integral part of that. Lifestyle is very important to the TrueMove campaign (indeed, it’s campaign concept is “Fun Living Lifestyle”) and it wants its subscribers to be able to use barcodes for shopping, marketing and e-tickets.
The 3GVision CEO, Mendy Mendelsohn said “Based on our years of experience in Japan, where QR codes have become a natural extension of the mobile phone, we now look forward to helping TrueMove make the most of 2D codes, reinforcing their positioning as Thailand’s most innovative service provider.”
What we think?
The complete failure of mobile barcodes to translate their astounding success in Japan to the rest of the world is one of those things that has always bewildered me. They are such a part of everyday life over there. Companies like 3GVision, who are a part of that culture, must find it generally quite annoying. Despite the fact that there is already a proven business model for 2D barcodes, they just haven’t quite made it overseas yet. In fact, it’s American and European companies who are really making it happen.
A technical question: why in Japan did not have technical problems with 2Dbarcode? Maybe cause there is only one reader insalled on the majority of japanese mobile phones and only QR diffused on the market (not datamatrix or others format)?
Why in Europe and US so many times barcode doesn’t function? Why European mobile operators did not yet made agreements with some barcode producer? Now something is changhing.
But I agree with you, why not before?
Just a question: which is business model for reader producer since there are some free reader available on the market?
There are 2 ecosystems, one from the “internet/web” and one from the “career/telco”. http://bit.ly/soZJz (in french, sorry). There was no split strategy in Japan between the user-centric or the walled-gardened approaches like in Europe and the US. European and American markets evolve with different players on the value chain, which, I agree, has changed since Application Market and downoladable free apps.
Companies that are only focused on the 2D barcode are out of the game when you see Goggle (not Google) application, a “visuel search technology” (without preference between OCR, image recognition, symbol recognition (1D, 2D), object recognition…) based on synchron or asynchron communication. In front of the fragmentation, Google’s response strategy is a technologically agnostic one. Directly to the user, through its cameraphone, it is now “search about what you see” (OCR, image recognition, symbol recognition (1D, 2D), object recognition, Augmented Reality…)