Hey guys, just stumbled upon something kinda cool. I had heard that the iPhoney (hahahaha) has some app that lets you scan in barcodes for like your gym keychain and frequent shopper tags and they can just scan those at the store. So I was at blockbuster the other day and I get one free coupon a month for a game rental. I usually print this up and it has a barcode that they scan at the store.
So I wondered if the barcode trick would work. I went to the blockbuster site with opera, went to "my account" and went to "print e-coupon". The image of the coupon came up on the screen. The employee was very skeptical and said we could at least manually enter the numbers under the code. I asked him to try and scan it and it instantly read the code from my 8330 screen and worked!! How cool is that, now I don't need to stop off at home to print the coupon if I forgot at work. I just pull out my trusty Curve and have them scan the screen!!
Yeah I'm totally excited. I wonder if I used my scanner at home and scanned in barcodes from my grocery store tags, I could drastically reduce the amount of crap on my keychain. Also I think I remember some app that you could use the camera to take a pic of the barcode and use it to find cheap prices or something like that.
That's awesome I wonder if it would work just by taking a picture of the key chain or coupon and saving it that way. My concern would be the quality of the shot.
I bet if I had a 3.2mp camera like on the tour that would increase the likelihood of success. However the flash and glare could probably be a problem in a pic that close. So the perfect environment with adequate lighting would probably be critical.
Just someone who doesn't understand that the entire benefit of a barcode coupon is that it can be used only once if programmed that way in their system. So either D&B is lagging, or the equally likely answer is that this person was uninformed.
No link, I just went to the blockbuster website with the Opera browser on my phone and pulled up an online coupon. The image of the coupon on my screen was able to be read by the handheld barcode reader at the cash register.
wait a minute... maybe I'm misunderstanding you...
Are you saying that you simply bring up a barcode on ur phone and have the people at the store scan it? or are u saying there is an app that u can scan the barcode with?
Im saying that if you have a coupon in your email, you can bring it up on your blackberry and have them scan the screen. At least it worked for me at blockbuster. So the next natural extension would be to try and scan in my keychain tags and see if that works at the grocery store, etc. I went into some detail at the beginning of the post.
