Changing How America Shops

Nagesh Challa, Ecrio CEO and long-time correspondent, is interviewed in Fast Company: Ecrio's Revolutionary Cell Phone Applications Could Change How America Shops. He describes one of their latest developments:

" ... MoBeam, a program that uses the LEDs on cell phones to create patterns that mimic bar-code sequences. For years, developers have been trying to display scannable bar codes on cell-phone screens -- unsuccessfully; light reflecting off the screens interferes with the scanners' detection systems. "Then I thought, What if we get out of the paradigm of trying to read the code off of the screen?" Challa says. "It's looking for light reflections, so why don't we just give it the light it's expecting?" The upshot: Instead of printing out online coupons, movie tickets, and boarding passes -- and toting around credit cards and gift cards -- consumers will soon be able to store bar codes in their phones. Visa found Challa's idea so revolutionary that it just announced plans to make MoBeam the centerpiece of its upcoming mobile-phone credit-card program ... "