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BRUSSELS, Belgium and PRINCETON, New Jersey, September 22, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — GS1 is the global supply chain standards organisation well-known for its barcodes that feature on millions of products sold in retail. It has membership from over one million companies worldwide, particularly manufacturers and retailers of consumer packaged goods.
GS1 Mobile Com is an industry-wide initiative started by GS1 in June 2007 to investigate the potential of businesses giving consumers access to product information via their mobile phones. Today, GS1 Mobile Com has released a position paper advising businesses to focus on GS1 standard barcodes for mobile applications. The aim is to prevent fragmentation in the current market for reading barcodes with cameraphones. The full position paper is available at http://www.gs1.org/docs/mobile/GS1_Mobile_Com_Barcodes_Position_Paper.pdf .
Vanderlei Roque dos Santos, eBusiness Project Manager for Nestle and co-chair of the GS1 Mobile Com work group, said, “This is a major step forward in simplifying the choices manufacturers have to make to start enabling mobile services via their products. It will drive innovation not only on product packaging but across a number of communication channels that brands use to interact with consumers.”
“Mobile barcodes are one of the ways that retailers can use to improve in-store experience for consumers. Having standards will make implementation easier and faster, across different markets,” commented Olivier Raynal, Innovation Manager for Carrefour.
More and more consumers are equipped with camera phones that are technically capable of reading barcodes. As well as the existing barcodes on products packaging (called 1-dimensional or 1D barcodes), new barcodes specifically designed to be scanned by a camera (called 2-dimensional or 2D barcodes) are now becoming available. As the pictures below show, barcodes can be “scanned” by consumers to access:

- information currently on the pack in a personalized format (allergens,
ingredients, nutrition facts).
- a wide range of information not currently available on packaging
- information that may be currently be handled on paper (such as coupons)

Read full article: Can Mobile Phones Read Barcodes?

You’ve been battling malware — viruses, worms, spyware and the like — on your PC for years.

Is your phone the next battleground?

Security experts think it could be, particularly if it’s a smart-phone, a handset that has a full operating system and can run applications much like a desktop computer. The more that phones can perform the same functions as PCs, the greater the chance they will have similar vulnerabilities, experts say.

“I’d put it in the looming threat category,” said Natalie Lambert, a senior analyst who covers mobile security issues for Forrester, a technology research firm. “There’s huge potential.”

But experts caution that consumers should put that potential threat in perspective. Other security issues — such as simply losing a phone — are arguably of more concern to mobile phone users today.

“It’s still very early in the game,” said Chris Hazelton, director of mobile and wireless research at the 451 Group, a technology research firm.

Still, phones are indeed vulnerable to the same types of security threats that face PCs. Security experts have so far identified about 500 viruses or other types of malware or security vulnerabilities that target mobile phones.

Perhaps the best known handset virus is Commwarrior-A, a piece of malware identified in 2005 that spread to phones using the then-current version of the Symbian operating system via text messages. But the number of pieces of mobile malware detected since then has grown steadily.

Analysts say there all kinds of ways that mobile malware could make mischief. Hackers have already induced phones to exchange text messages with rogue operators that charge a high per-message fee. Security experts worry hackers could soon use the GPS feature built into many phones to track the location of their owners.

Read full article: worry for mobile phones