To celebrate the busiest scanning season of the year, we are thrilled to bring you the Mobile Barcode Trend Report: Holiday Shopping Edition for 2012.  This Edition illustrates the dramatic growth in scanning as compared to year prior.  It also offers key insights into the who’s scanning and what is being scanned most.

The data collected spans the two weeks surrounding Black Friday – when scan rates accelerate the most.
Key takeaways include:

• One million more scans than last year
• 2D barcode scanning increased 71%
• Users scanned nearly 3 times , supporting the fact that people are scanning on multiple occasions
• Ages 25-44 made up the majority of users scanning at 49%

In addition, the dramatic rise in 2D barcodes compared to 1D clearly shows that marketers are looking for more control in their mobile strategies.  Flexibility to customizing the barcode experience is now preferred by brands.

For the “Top 5 Most Liked QR Codes” stat, it is interesting to note that each of the brands offered consumers a mobile-optimized experience – one that provided real value, whether a discount, video teaser or buyer’s guide. This underlines the fact that consumers prefer mobile sites over PC sites when scanning barcodes. It also reinforces that consumers want significance in what they scan.

Click the image below to magnify the report.  You may also download a printable version by clicking here.

THANK YOU to all the dedicated shopping fans!
Happy Scanning!

*Let us know how barcode scanning helped you this holiday season…we’ll share your posts via Facebook*

To keep you covered on all things mobile and QR Code related, we have our dashing British correspondent blogging right from the epicenter of the Olympic Games.

Most big athletic events, regardless of the sport or location, have one thing in common – there are lots of ways to spend your money on a great souvenir.  The London Olympic Games are no different.  In fact, the WSJ reported that organisers hope to sell more than £1 billion, about $1.55 billion, in these goodies to people from all over the world.

When walking around London, it is clear that the mobile channel is one important way they hope to achieve that goal and ScanLife QR Codes are helping any way they can.  Codes are placed at the events, and around the entire city, to connect visitors to a landing page where they can buy items directly through their mobile phones, or click to find the closest physical store using the device location.

While I am not a big shopper, I didn’t mind browsing the store on my iPhone while waiting for the next round of diving to begin.  Then the location feature pointed me right to the closest store and I even knew what I wanted before navigating the hundreds of others contributing to the Olympic shopping spirit.

If you ask me, this year the Olympic Games organisers have won the gold medal of mobile engagement!

If you’d like to know more about how to carry out great QR Code campaigns, join the Exchanging Smarter Ideas for Mobile Engagement Linkedin group, visit www.scanlife.com or contact us by sending a message at info [at] scanlife.com

We have just released the latest ScanLife Mobile Barcode Trend Report for Q4 2011. This edition takes a closer look at the busiest quarter of the year for mobile barcodes and some year-end growth comparisons to 2010.

One of the report’s highlights shows the “hockey stick” growth of scans by quarter dating all the way back to Q1 2009. Last year saw a 300% increase compared to 2010. Looking at the chart below, its pretty amazing to see just how far mobile barcode scanning has come these past few years.

The holiday season proved to be another huge period for engaging new users as people are searching for product information and millions of new Smartphones were activated.

Other key takeaways from this report:

• Q4 2011 saw more scans than all of 2009 and 2010 combined
• Over 3,000,000 new ScanLife users were activated in Q4 2011

• Among marketers using the ScanLife platform, the Consumer Packaged Goods industry saw the most scans for the first time ever
• Half of our users report being 18-34, and 60% are male which is consistent with the previous report

A HUGE thank you to everyone to everyone who made these numbers possible!  This data is compiled from our platform users, app users, and other 3rd party apps/code generators.

You can download the full report here.

Black Friday to Christmas is always the busiest time for retailers, and it is for us also!   Now that the dust has settled (a bit) from the opening party (aka Black Friday, and now “Cyberweek”), we wanted to share some interesting stats.

First we should say that the 10 days from 11/24-12/4 were record breaking days which saw scan rates as high as 8 per second.  We also recorded our biggest single scan day ever on Black Friday which was very exciting!

Some other fun facts:

• Scan rates were up 158% versus year ago (both 1D & 2D), with QR Code scanning up 263%.  This just shows how many more QR Codes are in the market versus a year ago.
• The top 5 US cities scanning were:  Orlando, Houston, San Antonio, New York, & Chicago
• Scans by OS were dominated by Android (47%) and iPhone (43%) with BlackBerry and others making up the remaining 10%
  
• Black Friday by Time of Day:
  • Biggest spike was at 1:00 AM EST as doors opened for Midnight sales in the Central Time zone.  Apparently those hard core shoppers are using all the tools to find the best deals!
  • Busiest time block was from 12-2 EST with 18% of all scans that day
• Top 3 electronics products being scanned (from UPC codes):
  • iPhone 4Gs (16 GB)
  • Nikon Coolpix
  • Garmin Nuvi GPS

Thanks to all of our users for being part of these momentous numbers, and keep scanning!

If you don’t already have the ScanLife app, check it out from www.getscanlife.com. 

ScanLife has just released it’s third edition of the Mobile Barcode Trend Report which looks at data and analysis from UPC and 2D barcode scanning aggregated across 30 countries around the world. This data includes scans from both the ScanLife app and other 3rd party apps.

Below is an infographic with some highlights from the report.  Download the complete PDF to see why people like Coca-Cola and George Bush!

As we move into a new year, we wanted to reflect on a pretty amazing 2010, so we just released a year-end Mobile Barcode Trend Report . When we launched ScanLife in Beta in 2008, it was a time when “Droid” was just something from a sci-fi movie and camera phones were meant for throwaway snapshots.  To say things have changed is an understatement.

In 2010, ScanLife saw over 1600% growth in mobile barcode traffic.  That doubled in the fourth quarter alone!  A year ago, ScanLife couldn’t even read UPC codes, and now it is more than half our traffic offering content ranging from local prices to coupons to nutritional information.

Some other highlights from the report:

• The largest scan days of the year for us were the day after Thanksgiving (“Black Friday”) and Christmas Day (as people received gifts, many being new Smartphones)
• The top most used features for people scanning UPC codes are Coupons, Prices, and Nutritional Info.  This reflects previous learning that Food and Personal Care are the most scanned categories.
• There was a 13% increase in female to male traffic, and a 25% increase in the 25-54 age group.  This is likely indicative of how the technology is evolving, and going more mainstream.

We truly appreciate the support of all our users and customers, and can’t wait to make 2011 the year mobile barcodes go completely mainstream.

You can download the full report here.

We released some exciting new ScanLife features when scanning UPC (1D) barcodes which are making everyone very happy – traffic was up 3x this weekend!  All of this is available to any Android, iPhone or BlackBerry with an auto-focus camera.

Before, we gave you options like online prices, user reviews, and product specs from most products.  Now, you can scan practically anything to get access to an even wider variety of content from digital coupons to local prices to nutritional information.

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