TechCrunch has a critical write-up of a new service/application called Mytago ("My Tags to Go") that tries to connect the offline and virtual worlds. It uses "tags" that are like bar codes, which can appear anywhere — a sign, a billboard, a store window. A user then takes picture with her camera phone and later gets details of a sale, an event, an offer, etc. on her PC.
The flaw (if it can be called that) is that one waits until one gets home or to a PC to receive the additional or desired information. Similar technologies are already in use in Japan and are coming to Europe and the US. I previously wrote about the more "immediate" Geovector and Neomedia applications here. They provide the data to the mobile device in real time.
But I agree with Michael Arrington that the idea of connecting the real world and the digital one is compelling. And the simplicity of "point and shoot" is also very appealing as a mobile use case. More is coming along these lines.
Screenwerk 
May 23, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Mr. Greg Sterling,
What do you think about Ms. Barbara’s comments? Do you agree with her?
http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/2006/04/25/comparison-shopping-with-mobile-phones/#comments
Ms. Barbara says:
“I have to make a few notes about the business, before I can comment on the design. First, Neomedia claims it holds the patent for scanning a bar code and using it to connect to the Internet (or something like that). Thus, they either have licensed to ScanBuy, or will end up sueing ScanBuy at a later time. I wonder about the business sense of the former option for a small relatively unknown company licensing to another, so I assume that we have a pending lawsuit – that Neomedia will intiate once ScanBuy gets significant leverage.
On the other hand, Neomedia has been acquiring a lot of companies recently. Merging companies takes a lot more than simply signing a document, particularly when you want to combine technologies, products, and practice in a way that generates the oft-cited “synergies”. This makes me think that life inside Neomedia is at best disorganized right now, so they won’t be able to do much more than maintain status quo while they figure things out – and that is likely to take them mostly out of the innovation picture for the next year or so. Of course, next year we may start seeing very interesting things.
From a user experience perspective, ScanBuy looks pretty interesting. They have more visible products. It appears (but I have no proof) that their technology will work slightly better. They have a broader variety of applications, and can thus do more with the same bar code – instead of one company owning the bar code, ScanBuy uses the bar code scanning simply as text input. For example, the “Your Pet” game requires you to “feed” your pet by scanning products. Silly, but similar to several successful iMode applications. PaperClick, on the other hand, has one mapping for a particular bar code. This moves all the intelligence to the server.
If both companies had presence on a single device, PaperClick would be seen as advertising, whereas ScanBuy would be more focused on what the user wanted to do. The suite of ScanBuy applications would provide more options, but also more complexity. “