Motorola Ventures is the investment branch of the mobile manufacturer – and today it has announced that it is leading an investment round into mobile barcodes. The receiving company is Scanbuy, which maintains the ever more popular Scanlife mobile barcode reader.
Scanlife?
It works like this:
You download the Scanlife application to your mobile phone. It works on pretty much any mobile phone that has a camera, from recent high-end smartphones to older feature phones. When you run the application, it lets you “scan” a barcode by taking a picture of it with your camera. That barcode then causes your phone to take an action – which can be anything from accessing information about a product to sending a text, opening a mobile web page or downloading an up-to-date train timetable. Scanlife will scan the traditional UPC barcodes you see on items in shops, as well as the most popular 2d barcode formats including Datamatrix and QR Codes.
The Motorola investment
Unfortunately there’s no figures for the actual amount invested here. But Motorola Ventures is the lead investor in a group that contains two other investment firms and several private investors.
Reese Schroeder, managing director of Motorola Ventures, claims that Motorola thought long and hard before choosing Scanbuy, saying “mobile barcodes are an extremely powerful tool for consumers, businesses and wireless providers, which makes this opportunity very exciting for Motorola. The camera quality, display capability and processing power of today’s smartphones, coupled with advanced network speeds, now enable consumers and the advertising community to fully take advantage of mobile barcode technology.”
What we think?
It has been a year of upheaval for Motorola – most dramatically in the way it threw itself behind the Android operating system. So we’ve got a mobile maker here that it is seriously re-adjusting the way it thinks about the future, and trying to get behind the technology makers and providers that it thinks will be the hottest. Which, overall, makes this a pretty good sign for Scanbuy.
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I think it’s great that Scanbuy has the commercial strength to keep landing these large clients. HOWEVER, I can not endorse the proprietary nature of the software. What is not commonly known is that not all Scanbuy readers are able read QR codes and of the ones that can, example iPhone, you get to take an extra stop at Scanbuy’s website to read this message: “This code is not registered or was created from an unknown source.” That message was given because I used a QR code created somewhere other than Scanbuy’s website. Not a fan.
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