Nokia improves Point & Find with German mobile barcode company Barcoo

The latest beta of Nokias “Point & Find” service has been unveiled in Stuttgart as part of Nokia World. The biggest announcement is that Nokia has announced it is in a deal with German shopping service Barcoo to use product barcodes to display info on your mobile.

First of all, what is “Point & Find”?

At it’s simplest, P&F is a service that would allow you to point your mobile camera at any product or service, and be connected to it over your mobile. You point your phone at something, and it finds it for you. That simple. The implementation of that service is, of course, hideously complicated. Nokia has a heavily idealised video of what it hopes the service might be capable of some day available at the site: http://pointandfind.nokia.com/

So who is Barcoo?

Barcoo is a company with a much simpler, more realistic and actually operational idea. Barcoo simply connects the traditional barcode you would find on any grocery product with a mobile Internet page about that product. Depending on what the product is, there will be more or less information available for it, but Barcoo users could expect to find product information, nutritional and allergy advice (in the case of food), links to Wikipedia articles about the product and sites like Amazon or Ebay where you could order the product on-line.

This is first time a German shopping application has been integrated into Point & Find. If you install Point & Find on your device, Barcoo comes with it automatically. You won’t have to install it separately. Some Nokia models will even bring up location-based price comparisons for the product.

What we think?

Whether or not Point & Find works out in the long run, this does showcase some of the advantages of being an operator. You want your “augmented reality” app to do something in particular? Just find a company that’s doing it already and bring them into the fold. It’s also a lot easier to do than recognising a picture of a packet of crisps, for example. Having a simple program that can decode an infinite variety of barcodes is much more efficient than having a program that needs to access a vast database of photos of products to crosscheck which one you’ve just taken a picture of.