M-payment: Image Capture for Mobile Comparison and Purchase
- The Polish start-up iTraff Technology launches SaveUp, an OCR-based mobile app to allow mobile purchases for niche segment of cultural items sales.
- The user takes a picture of the product with his mobile phone (promotional poster of books, CDs or games for instance); the app then sets up a list of partner e-merchants offers and highlights the less expensive one. If available, the digital version of the product is also presented. Proposed for iPhone, this solution should soon be made available in Android, too.
- Beforehand entered customer data is stored on his Smartphone and sent to enable payments.
- Partners already include about fifty merchants or over 140,000 book entries (five offers per book on average).
- iTraff specialises in an especially profitable segment as almost 60% of the European m commerce revenue is derived from book sales (source: IDC survey for Akamai). Also, the development of the m-commerce sector favours the increase of impulsive purchases: and, above all, of micro-payments.
- The start-up now wishes to expand its reach in Europe and plans to propose its solution in Great Britain as well as in Germany, and even in France.
- According to Idate’s E-books Markets & Forecasts 2008-2015 (September 2011), sales of digital books are steadily increasing (590 million euros revenue in 2010 in the US and over 520 million in Japan). Europe still has to catch up but witnesses 80% progress in dematerialised books sales.
- In this context, image recognition is an alternative to QR codes, preferred by different players including the Swedish Payair, Netherlands-based QRiD, Canadian Mobio, or the German solution tagPAY, for instance.