In addition to working at the San Diego Symphony, I'm also a grad. student right now, and I've recently taken on a research project involving using Smartphones to display scannable barcodes, rather than having printed tickets. I seem to remember someone in one of our general sessions at the conference last year mentioning that Cisco was working on this kind of technology? Can anyone point me in the right direction or give me any direction with regards to places to look for more information? I appreciate it!
-Annette Grieshaber
Group Sales Coordinator, San Diego Symphony
We just tried that in a test environment. It was what we expected, the red-laser type scanners just got a blank signal from bouncing off the glass of the iPhone surface.
I think the only way to scan these devices will be with some kind of passive scanner.
When we launched our online ticketing system last year here at the Science Museum of Minnesota, a couple of us in marketing testing a PDF barcode with an iPhone and it worked! We were excited about that. So we have experience that it does work. We use N-Scan scanners.
Eric MuellerElectronic Marketing Coordinator / Web DesignerScience Museum of Minnesota
From: Mark Wladika <bounce-markwladika8458@tessituranetwork.com>Sent: 4/10/2009 7:29:57 PM
Hi :)
Have a look at this part of the Network: http://www.tessituranetwork.com/network/Products/Network%20Products%20Services/N-Scan.aspx
N-Scan is a product allowing Access control using ticket, print-out and smartphone scanning. I gather that the 3-d scanners (the ones that spin around like a shop-till scanner) have no trouble reading barcodes on LED and OLED devices like smartphones / smart-cams, etc.
There is a very recent webinar on N-Scan which showcases the features of the system and its integration with Tessitura very well, you'll find it here: http://www.tessituranetwork.com/network/Learning/Webinars/Webinars%20Archive/General/Intro%20to%20N-Scan.aspx
Hope this helps :)
There are some companies that provide a service to deliver barcodes from various sources to mobile devices. Mobiqa is one that comes to mind. The tricky part of this is being able to capture and feed them all the information they require to actually deliver to a wide range of potential devices. It is an evolving market so will likely get more robust over the coming years.
As for being able to read barcodes from mobile devices, it works as long as you are using a scanner with a 2D reader. The traditional 1D scanners (the single red line) won't generally work. This is one of a few reasons to opt for these newer types of scanners when looking at access control.