Red Laser: the proactive consumer's best friend

As with many things, if you look hard enough down the long tail you can discover something that can truly enhance your life, whether it be a certain obscure genre of music, a movie, or a book. In our case, it’s an iPhone app.

With iPhone apps, the gamut runs from the quotidian to the utterly ludicrous (and hilarious; we recently heard about the now discontinued “I am Rich” app that displayed a useless red gem with absolutely no functionality on your phone for the pure, narcissistic purpose of reminding you and others around you that you were rich enough to cover the $999.99 price tag). But Occipital’s Red Laser is neither boring nor ridiculous. It’s just plain awesome. And useful.

At LivingSocial, we are all about people having the most information at their fingertips so they can make the best decisions possible. So we were uber excited when we heard about Red Laser 2.0. From the people behind ClearCam comes an app that enables you to check online prices, reviews, and more on products with UPC and EAN barcodes. Browsing an electronics store? Want to cross-check the price of a wireless router and see what others are saying about it? With Red Laser, just pass your iPhone camera over the barcode. It’s that simple.

Barcode scanning apps aren’t anything new, but frankly, many of them don’t live up to the hype (though IBM’s new food traceability app Breadcrumbs looks very promising). Other apps require you to actually snap a picture of the barcode, whether it’s a traditional linear barcode or the lesser-known 2D barcodes that are having difficulty gaining traction in the US, and wait for the photo to process before giving you the information you need. But with Red Laser 2.0, the process has been streamlined with added functionality. Now all you need to do is simply hold the camera over the barcode.

It’s also extremely easy for LivingSocial users to add stuff to their collections on the fly. Here’s how:

Download Red Laser to your iPhone.

Scan the barcode of the product you’re interested in. Let’s say it’s a book.

After Red Laser scans the barcode of the book, it will show up in the “Scanned Products” list. From here you can proceed two ways, whichever is more convenient for you:

Email

1) Click the arrow located in the bottom-left corner and email yourself the book (or if you scan multiple books, an entire list). This will send you the title of the book and the ISBN.

2) Next, simply access your email and copy and paste the ISBN into the search box the next time you log in to LivingSocial.

Amazon Wish List

1) After scanning the book or books, click the ISBN # in the “Scanned Products” list (underneath, it says “Tap To Search”).

2) This will bring up a list of places on the web where the book is for sale. Amazon should be the first listed. Click the book title under Amazon.

3) Once you’ve done this, click the yellow “Add to Wish List” button.

4) The next time you log in to LivingSocial, click “My Collection.”

5) Click the “import or export your collections” link on the right.

5) Also on the right, below “Import a Collection,” you should see “Import Amazon Wishlist.” Click that.

6) Now enter the email address that corresponds to your Amazon account and click “search.”

7) LivingSocial will pull up all the books from your Amazon wishlist and you can add them to your collection from here. It’s as simple as that!

And as an added bonus, the development kit is free for the taking. We can’t wait to see how others will use the SDK to integrate Red Laser into their apps. Who knows, maybe we’ll give it a whirl?