German supermarket pushes cellphone shopping
By Will Park on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 2:02 PM PST In Announcements, Services, Technologies
Leave it to the Germans to push the fore-front of innovation in the supermarket. Apparently not satisfied with pushing innovative technologies and design in the automotive field, Germans at the country’s “Future Store” supermarket have come up with an interesting way to shop for your groceries. With a few clicks of your mobile phone’s camera, Future Store wants shoppers to take pictures of items’ barcodes.
Just snap pics of the barcodes on all your groceries as you load up the cart. When it comes time to check-out, all the barcodes that you just recorded are tallied up and consolidated in to a barcode. An automated kiosk will take care of scanning the barcode on your cellphone’s display, and prompt you for payment – via cash, credit card, fingerprint, and even NFC in the near future.
Now, if only those Germans could find an innovative way to do away with the shopping cart altogether. Yea, we’re that lazy.
[Via: BBC]
