Hot dog! Occipital, the company behind RedLaser, has been on fire since we last covered them in December. As of today, RedLaser, the top-selling iPhone app that leverages your camera to scan barcodes, announces today that it has been downloaded over 2 million times. Of those 2 million downloads, 950,000 of users have been active in the last month, Occipital CEO Jeff Powers informs us.
This is a huge win for the barcode-scanning application in a crowded field. Despite the fact that there are many free barcode-scanning apps, RedLaser has destroyed the competition. Occipital claims this is because of a much higher-quality barcode scanning that can handle many of the idiosyncrasies of the iPhone camera and deal with the challenges of taking pictures in the real world.
RedLaser lets you scan the barcode of nearly any item with your iPhone camera. It then tells you where you can buy that same item and for how much in the local area, allowing you to comparison shop easily. It also provides data from online retailers in case a local shop doesn’t have the information.
Currently, the only problem with RedLaser is the lack of local product data. Only a few online and local retailers actually share their product availability and pricing information, so you don’t get a full picture of what’s available. Considering that it already has an incredible engagement and download rate with imperfect data, the possibilities for this market are enormous.
In case you’re wondering, the 50 millionth product was a Deuter Backpack, scanned by a RedLaser user in Germany at 1:14 PM GMT on May 8, 2010.
RedLaser also announced that it is starting to leverage Mechanical Turk to continue to improve its barcode scanning operation. This mix of human-and-machine is a common way to get around the various complexities in image, sound and video recognition.