January 7, 2006
Cellphones for comparison shopping
A new Toshiba software will let shoppers use their handsets to check the reputations of products on the Internet, reveals Asahi.
The service will include products such as consumer electronics products, food, books, CDs, DVDs and cosmetics. When the cellphone camera shoots the bar code, the information is sent to a server, which then searches through blogs for reviews.
About 10 seconds later, a summary will be displayed on the phone screen reporting how many blogs were positive and how many were negative. The actual comments on the blogs can also be viewed as well as information on related products.
Toshiba categorized about 500,000 Japanese words into fields such as travel and culture, and classified words related to evaluation as good or bad. The results were used to create a database that makes it possible to analyze blog comments at high speed.
A similar service is already being provided by a Sony Corp. affiliate.
Photo Navi Wine, provided by mobile content producer Zeta Bridge Corp., offers information on wines from cellphone shots of wine labels. By attaching a label image to an e-mail message and sending it to photo@wine55.jp, details, such as the wine's classification and country, will be mailed back in 15 to 20 seconds.
Restaurant customers can become instant sommeliers. Sony's image recognition technology recognizes even vague or crooked camera shots taken in dark restaurants and can make matches with the roughly 3,000 brands Zeta Bridge holds information on. About 500 brands can be ordered using the cellphone
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