StickyBits: Add a bar code based history to any physical object | Hacker News Reader

StickyBits: Add a bar code based history to any physical object

stickybits.com

The examples are a bit laughable..

"Attach your resume to your business card" - You could just add a web link instead and everyone would understand instead of limiting yourself to a very specific subset of users that know what to do with the barcode. (Same with "attach photos of what you're selling to a flyer")

Plus, is there any type of control on these barcodes? Can I claim a barcode and not allow anyone to add anything else? That would be quite important if you're going to put it on a business card..

Yes, you can create websites and link to them, but it's cumbersome.

With stickybits, you can just upload and you're done. And people see your resume immediately when scanned.

Also, the first person to scan a barcode is the "moderator" and can delete any content that gets posted.

That's some nice web design. Lots of attention to detail. Cool product idea, too. Reminds me of Barcode Battler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode_Battler

yeah, gorgeous design, really awesome name, and the product seems cool, though not sure how useful at this point? The number of things you would want to put big vinyl stickers on seems kind of small, but if this is the first step it is very exciting. Being able to track the provenance of an object unobtrusively (via RFID?) would be really neat.

Well, from a business perspective, if you're a company with equipment (medical, electronics, tools, etc) you could have employee "check out" equipment with their phones. If you're a company that works with documents (engineering, legal, what have you) you could attach barcodes to physical copies (shoot, you could overlay them on the digital ones to so they print off with the doc itself) and use them to easily pull up a record of the document. These are just a few uses that come to mind, but basically anywhere that you need to identify something or someone, you could use this as a starting point and build out from there.

To target this use-case they would need to limit the number of wide-eyed, open mouthed monkeys they use on their sales page.

No problem: take the same technology, rebrand it have a "business-oriented" name, make a different landing page, then sell both versions.

That's what we do (track medical devices, pallets, documents, etc., with barcodes and RFID).

The biggest barrier by far for this market is the status-quo: if you have to add even a few steps to employees’ current workflow, the project will have a much harder time getting off the ground.

You could implement this sort of tracking in a very non-intrusive way with RFID: put an RFID scanner in the supply room, which reads the employees' and equipments' RFID tags such that the monitoring system knows that employee X left room Y with equipment Z.

Hasn't this sort of thing been in production for years with UPS/WalMart/etc?

Yes, we have a variety of rules and methods to do things like that, but you might be surprised at how many issues there still are. In the Wal-Mart case for example, they spent years trying to get compliance from their suppliers, and in the end they had to cut back on their goals and requirements because of the extra steps (and costs) needed.

Also, RFID as a commercialized technology is still relatively new (even though it's been around for a long time), and there are a lot of technical hurdles that most people don’t know about. For example, a standard, Wal-Mart style RFID tag won't read if you hold it close to the body (or put it in a pocket), or put it on metal or liquid; in those cases, you have to use a special tag, or a battery assisted tag ("active rfid", which can be much more expensive), or an "RTLS" tag (wifi, ultra-wideband, etc). It's all really interesting (to me anyway), but the industry has had to spend quite a bit of time getting over all of the hurdles that are non-obvious (like any industry I suppose).

Interesting to see some real-life perspective on this issue. Seems the trade-off is cost vs convenience.

First 'web 2.0' website I am seeing that is so well designed AND uses extensively tables for HTML markup. The site is basically one large image without any real text, so far for SEO.

Yeah, the first thing I did was 'view source'. Sheesh, what a mess.

Check out this: http://static.stickybits.com/web/images/fp_08.jpg. Zero SEO value by putting text in images.

For such a great design, it totally fails at implementation.

To ensure the same type of experience across browsers, we decided to make much of the top images. Most people still use IE, and we didn't want gross rendered text.

Also, I like tables :) They just work.

i think the concept is kinda weak. i'd use a QR code with a link to a wiki page, if that's what this is.

so they're proposing a wiki page for each unique bar code... that smells like wikipedia, but i don't see "business value" in it.

that site looks like they're trying to market something, which means that they're trying to make money with this. i can't imagine how that's supposed to work.

QR codes are just an embedded block of text. They can also redirect you to a URL, so in that case, it's just a shortcut to typing.

Stickybits allows you to actually write to barcodes (effectively using the barcode as just a pointer to lots of media)

No easy way to do this with QR and be social. Unless you set up a website.

No marketing, just want to use codes and attach digital content to real world objects.

Very cool idea. Had similar idea recently; Product GPS. Find what store closest to you has X in stock, who has best price and where can I find it in this huge store (walmart, target, macy, etc).

Good luck

Unless I'm misunderstanding things, Stickbits is that website. You just chose to use your own barcodes instead of QR codes for some reason.

The app can use any bar code as the identifier. You can scan a stickybit-generated bar code, a QR code, or a random UPC code from the back of a product in a store.

No easy way to host digital media without setting up a website? Are you serious?

I mean in terms of steps and to make it easy for others to append their own content after yours.

EDIT: Quite ironically... they use a QR code on the Android download page! http://www.stickybits.com/android/

QR codes for the win! Seems like the Android world has really latched onto this... with the iPhone kind of not so much. You can store a lot more data in a QR code.

There are some handy tools for a common Android workflow which is, I'm at home and I need to bail real fast to catch a bus or head out, but I want the site I am viewing on my computer on my phone. I generate a quick QR code of the page, snap a pic with my phone, and leave.

Here are some links: http://code.google.com/p/qrbookmarklet/ and http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2008/11/qr-code-bookmarklet...

I built a simple tool here in Honolulu to enhance a service that does estimated arrival times. You can find it here - http://thebus.ws/about. One of the thing I want to do as a public service and because I am a bus nerd, is get some durable plastic tags printed out with a bazillion QR codes for every bus stop on the island, and mount them in a semi-secure fashion (punks are always gonna fuck with things.... but these will be cheap so who cares). That way when you're at a bus stop you can snap a pic of the QR code and load up the page with all the bus arrivals.

GPS is even easier (which is how I am doing it right now, finding stops near you) but this is just another way to make things quicker.

I wish we would adopt QR codes more here in the US of A... Japan uses them all over the place.

> I wish we would adopt QR codes more here in the US of A... Japan uses them all over the place.

Agreed.

The stickybits value-add is providing the infrastructure for a social version of what you described. You can set it up with absolutely zero technical knowledge (a key factor that people on HN can easily forget about -- don't forgot about the normals)

Of course anyone could whip up a free QR code that encodes a URL to your website/webapp/wiki/whatever and get the same thing more or less, but YOU must get the code and put the it on a sticker, YOU must build the wiki, YOU must integrate twitter/foursquare/facebook/geocoding, etc). That sounds like a fun project actually, but a normal company wanting that will have to put up big bucks to a developer to make the system. With stickybits, you buy some (overpriced) stickers, and all the features I described above are available to users with a complexity equivalent to texting. So, this concept is anything BUT weak. Simplifying a process is really, really important. When the iPod first came out, there were a lot of technically better options, but the iPod/iTunes combo was so easy to use that it crushed the competition. The cool factor was there too, and I don't know if barcodes will ever be considered cool, but that's another thread.

As far as making money...of course they will try to make money. It's a company, not a non-profit. I presume the money is in the data, much like bit.ly. Stickybits will be able to see who is scanning what codes, and where that's all happening. That information is ultra-valuable to any company trying to sell or promote something. In fact, I would not be surprised one bit if the prices of those sticker packages approach zero, because the real value is in gathering data, not selling stickers, and free stickers will help the userbase grow faster so a competitor doesn't steal their lunch.

The biggest hurdle would be getting people to adopt the stickybits app, or more generally getting other apps to adopt the stickybits API. The advantage of QR codes is that the format is standardized and widely adopted (well, relatively speaking). The best use-case would be using a QR code when encodes your company's website or whatever (NOT a stickybit code), but then scan that code with stickybits to add the cool social features. Then you hit all audiences: stickybit app users get to see the social comments and check-ins, while the information degrades gracefully for standard QR readers still can understand the underlying URL.

(Billy, I think it would be great if the stickybits app was able to decode QR codes and show that data, instead of only showing comments and the title. I guess currently you'd make a QR code, scan it with stickbits and, from the app, set the title and first comment to the content encoded in the QR code.)

The main use-case I see for this is physical objects which already have a barcode. If you were going to go to the trouble of barcoding something yourself (e.g., business card), you'd be better off using a URL, where you'd be able to control what gets associated with the barcode, to say nothing of avoiding the chicken-egg issues with something like this.

Seems interesting, it reminds me of delicious but for products. That to me is the best use case, like their example "Scan a cereal box barcode and attach your best treats recipe".

The other ones, like putting a barcode on a birthday card, I'm not so sure about.

This reminds me of the CueCat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat).

From what I recall, the CueCat was born of the same idea, but was quite before its time (for example, it connected via PS/2).

Agreed, CueCat was well before its time. Dave Mathews (not the singer) was one of the creators of the CueCat and generally everything he does is well before its time.

Just as a heads up, www.stickybits.com is blocked by default in the NETGEAR UTM25. It is classified as a "pornograph/sexually explicit" web site.

If any Stickybits people read this, you may want to bug them (Netgear) about clearing your name.

An update to this. I was able to get Netgear to reclassify the site, it should be accessible through all Netgear filters now. :)

What a greap app! Fantastic design of the homepage as well.

Interesting that they got that through the appstore. Didn't think they allowed barcode scanning apps, but maybe that was just amazon that didn't allow such apps. I think it's a good idea to build this app around fun, and then add the business aspects later.

I would not be surprised though if this app is pulled from the appstore because of some bogus claim and that apple launches a similar feature with a selected partner, but more shopping oriented.

There are plenty of barcode scanning apps, the best probably being RedLaser (http://redlaser.com/).

They use Redlaser's SDK.

True. In fact we're working more closely with Stickybits to do more than just license them the RedLaser SDK. Stay tuned for more on that.

My cofounder and I are working on a product that, in part, replaces a piece of enterprise hardware with a QR code sticker so shaky reading isn't an option. We've been looking at the Red Laser sdk so hopefully we'll be in touch soon.

This is actually the first major application that has aspects of it powered by SimpleGeo (as pointed out by Joe Stump here http://twitter.com/joestump/status/10224268993). I think it's as big of an accomplish for SimpleGeo as it is for StickyBits. Both companies are doing some amazing things...

Shame the Android app is Android 2.0+ only, which means I'm unable to try it with my Hero, at least for the moment.

Well that explains why I couldn't download it on my Hero either. Indeed, a shame.

Patent pending

Seriously? A somewhat interesting use of bar codes, but not worthy of a patent.

The CueCat rides again, except now with spam potential. o_O

Reply on news.ycombinator.com