RedLaser on a Roll: 2 Million Downloads, 950K Active Users and 50 Million Product Scans
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.
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.