Standardisation in mobile barcodes is becoming a reality

This year has seen great news in standardisation for mobile and 2d barcodes. The main highlights have been the NeoMedia patent win, and the recent Scanbuy announcement of a five-company barcoding push for packaging  (I won’t be touching on any legal proceedings in this article, by the way. If you want information on the NeoMedia/Scanbuy infringment case check the report from Bena on Friday). And now we have another significant piece of news, from GS1. The global standards body has facilitated a huge meeting between brands, retailers and mobile barcoding providers to discuss the future of an open standard.

What is GS1?

It’s a global non-profit body, dedicated to making supply/demand chains as effective as possible through open standards. Essentially, it wants to make the movement of goods around the world as trackable and transparent as possible, using open systems that everyone can benefit from. Amongst other things, GS1 is responsible for maintaining the global UPC barcode standard. Specifically, GS1 MobileCom has been created to look into creating open standards for NFC and mobile barcodes that can be used to really push mobile techonologies in retail.

What was this meeting about?

The purpose of the meeting was to assess the current state of mobile barcode retail, and to discuss the future of the industry. A lot of the representatives at the meeting were from global brands and retailers. Amongst the brand attendees were Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Kraft, L’Oréal, Wal-Mart and Carrefour. The MMA, GSMA and CTIA were there on the advertisers side. They met with barcode solution providers at MIT to push two particular objectives. The first is that ever consumer should be able to use their phone to get reliable product information and services for any physical product. Second, this has to be done using open standards, so that everyone can be involved and create good user experience.

We won’t see any real results from this meeting until September, when a white paper will be published. The next mobile area that the group will be tackling is mobile promotions and coupons.

What we think?

Ok, so nothing even slightly concrete has come from this meeting, but that’s really not the point. The recent story about DuPont pushing to get 2d barcodes onto packaging is huge news - and this meeting just proves how big a business mobile barcodes are going to be. For months and months now, mobile barcode gurus have been saying that the potential for 2d barcodes is HUGE, if only proper standards can be implemented. And now the organisation behind one of the most powerful barcode standards in the world is getting involved, pulling brands, advertisers and solution providers together.