Check out, using a phone

OK, who hasn’t found themselves getting frustrated when standing in a supermarket check-out queue, waiting for the person in front to search through purses, pockets and wallets looking for the right loyalty, gift or membership card, only to be equally unprepared when it gets to be their turn at the check-out?

Such cards and vouchers are now an established part of the retail trade’s plan to make the customer’s experience of the shopping process as fulfilling as possible. But the process of utilising them can be a frustrating one for everyone else waiting in the queue. So anything that can speed up that process has to be a potential enhancement to the overall customer experience.

That is exactly the target for Mobeam and its Beep’nGo application. Designed for Android-based smartphones, and to be found on the Google Play app store, Beep’nGo gives consumers the ability to keep all of their loyalty, gift and membership cards right on their smartphone so they can be  `beamed’ straight to the scanners used in the check outs in millions of stores.

Beep’nGo is, for now at least, exclusively available on the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the core Mobeam platform for barcodes will also be activated for use by the Samsung Wallet on the Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy Note 3.

“Consumers are ready to use their smartphones for mobile commerce, but so far the industry hasn’t been able to deliver,” said President and CEO, Kang M. Lee. “With Beep’nGo, people can easily use their smartphone instead of a plastic card at grocery and department stores, gyms and millions of other retail outlets. Powered by Mobeam, the Beep’nGo application is designed to simplify people’s lives while it saves them time and money.”

To get hold of Beep’nGo consumers simply download the application to their Galaxy S4 or Galaxy Note 3. To use the application, just select a loyalty, gift or membership card to redeem, push the `beam’ button and point the smartphone screen to send the card’s barcode to any of the millions of laser scanners in use today. Earlier this year, Samsung said retailers prefer using barcodes because they do not have to install any new infrastructure.

The embedded beaming technology solves the key problem that has limited the progress of mobile commerce: widely deployed retail laser scanners are unable to scan a barcode presented on a smartphone screen. Mobeam has, however, managed to overcome this obstacle without requiring retailers to invest in new point-of-sale hardware or system upgrades.

The system scans in the barcodes of loyalty cards, gift cards and vouchers, and, when required, sends the selected code to the check out laser scanner by using pulses of light on the display screen that mimic the way the barcode is read. This is said to be far more reliable than the scanner trying to read the barcode directly from the screen, where it can be affected by light reflections.