Cameraphones as barcode readers

There's a new software app for smartphones running on the Symbian operating system that lets you use the phones built-in camera (assuming it has one) as a barcode reader. It doesn't work with regular barcodes (there are already a few programs like Scanbuy that claim to do that), but it does let anyone embed a URL into a special barcodes called semacodes. We can see why something similar failed with the CueCat that came out a few years ago, since it was only for PCs, but with most cellphones actually typing out a URL is a hassle and anything that saves people some time and trouble is good.

[Via The Feature]