The Samsung Galaxy S4 was unveiled in New York last night. Among its repertoire of additional features, the device will be the first with the ability to transmit 1-D barcodes.Mobeam, the US mobile couponing and ticketing company, has embedded its light based communications (LBC) technology into the smartphone to enable the feature.
With embedded mobeam technology, the Galaxy S4 will be able to engage in mobile commerce at millions of locations worldwide without requiring retailers to make changes to their existing point of sale (POS) systems or technologies.
As a result, this development addresses a problem within the mobile commerce sector: the vast majority of existing POS systems are unable to communicate with smartphones. With mobeam’s technology, the Galaxy S4 can beam traditional 1-D barcode data to any laser scanner with no new equipment, such as optical scanners or backend systems, required by the retailer. As Samsung noted during this year’s Mobile World Congress, retailers prefer barcodes because they don’t have to install any new infrastructure to support them.
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