WOW…. Crossing the Digital Divide

Snaptell Screenshot (Source: Techcrunch)

I alway knew we would see a day where we would start to prolific crossover between physical world shopping and the digital domain. I expected that we would see phones with built in barcode scanners or maybe RFID as the digital “missing link” that allowed us to take real world data and work with it in real time to connect to digital businesses. Even things like QR Codes and Telstra Mobile Codes implementation of them go someway to help us across this chasm. I guess I am showing some “limited thinking.”

A couple of VERY COOL apps for the iPhone (I’ll save iPhone Rants for another post) have shown me that I need to really expand my thinking. The first (thanks to TechCrunch) is SnapTell and it is tres cool !! It takes photos of items such as books, games and CDs and then automatically uses that image to search for reviews, updates competitive prices and then uses the internet to connect to competing online stores. Snaptell does support other phones and operating systems as well.

The second is Shazam (equally tres cool)! Using the iPhone, you can record any song (or a portion of it) and the application will search its music database and tell you the name of the song, the artist, the album and so on. Like Snaptell, Shazam also works on other platforms, even Android.

In both cases, I love these things because they are intuitive and because the work the way we do. They listen to a song, or look at the cover and then get the data to help us make choices. I am sure that these things have thier challenges and that there will be lots more still to be done to make them comprehensive and foolproof, but they certainly bode for even more big changes in retailing.