Our demographic isn’t tech-savvy. We needed a scanner that just worked, all the time. So we picked RedLaser.
-peter michailidis, cmo of pushpins

Pushpins is an innovative application, which offers coupon discovery, delivery, and redemption of coupons in grocery stores across America. When linked to a loyalty card, Pushpins can even apply coupons automatically to customer bills, creating a seamless shopping experience, and providing retailers a easy way to monitor coupon redemption.

“We can know what store the shopper is in and what product they’re standing in front of, and then deliver targeted coupons straight to the shopper. It is a powerful combination,” said Peter Michailidis, the CMO and co-founder of Pushpins.

Pushpins has keyword search for identifying high-level product categories, like “tomatoes” or “corn flakes.” But for optimum coupon-delivery, Pushpins needed to know exactly which products were looking at — even down to package size or flavor. To get this level of precision and to streamline the coupon-discovery process, Pushpins turned to RedLaser.

Why RedLaser? Reliability and speed

Pushpins founders Michailidis and Jason Gurwin knew their basic requirements for a barcode scanning SDK:

• Scan the barcodes found in grocery stores – particularly UPC-A and UPC-E codes
• Work on as many iOS devices as possible, including older iPhones and iPod Touches
• High accuracy, with a low false-positive rate
• Fastest scanning possible

The team tested a wide range of scanners, and picked RedLaser. “It was the best we tested,” said Michailidis, and they’re still happy with their choice, two years later.

RedLaser’s impact

Today, Pushpins users fall into two camps:

• Planners: Planners use Pushpins to build shopping lists and manage their groceries.
• Coupon-ers: Coupon-ers are typically young, single, males on technology’s cutting edge, and looking for serious deals.

The behavior of users in both groups has been significantly changed by inclusion of a scanner.

Planners — 70% of Pushpins’ user base — use the scanner in their home, scanning to access food and nutritional information, or to add items onto their shopping list.  The addition of a scanner reduces friction for these tasks, and simplifies identifying products in bulk. These users are also more likely to have older devices, like the iPod Touch or iPhone 3G, which don’t have auto-focus cameras. RedLaser has been a leading scanner on these devices since its inception.

For coupon-ers, the scanner is taken into store aisles. Buying decisions are informed by Pushpin’s deals, and the scanner accelerates the discovery proces — even in stores with bad lighting or disfigured barcodes.

The Pushpins team has been particularly surprised by one finding — kids love using the scanner. “Many of our older users just hand the phone off to their kids,” explained Michailidis, “and they just go wild, scanning everything! We never expected that kids would be some of our biggest scanners.”

Get RedLaser!

You can join Pushpins, and hundreds of other companies, in integrating RedLaser into your application. Our developer portal has a simple form which can get you developing today. Alternatively, get in touch with our team to learn more.

We’re happy to announce RedLaser for iPhone 3.2! This latest version of RedLaser includes a host of new features as well as several user interface changes that make RedLaser 3.2 the cleanest, fastest, and most useful RedLaser yet.

We’ve worked hard to bring you more prices from more stores and with more content for all the products you love to buy. We’ve also enhanced our core scanning engine, enabling RedLaser to scan even faster. And we’ve completely rebuilt our back-end infrastructure so we can show you results in the app with lightning fast speed. Watch our screencast (above) and go see for yourself by trying RedLaser 3.2 now — it’s on iTunes now.

We recently stumbled on an inspired use for QR codes from Prosthetic Knowledge: a safer version of Russian roulette. Instead of a chambered round, this QR code might send you to an (in)famous internet video … or to cute photos of baby animals.

Take out RedLaser and test your luck!

The RedLaser team is proud to announce the release of our iOS SDK version 3.3.0. This release is now available to all production accounts, and for evaluation.

This new update contains a number of new features and bug fixes. Of particular note for our users: this update removes the unique device identifier [UDID] call from the SDK.

Use of these identifiers was deprecated in iOS 5.0, and recently, accessing UDIDs in an application may result in rejection in app review.  Due to this change, developers should use RedLaser iOS SDK version 3.3.0 or later in all future applications. This change will not impact existing applications. Historically, we’ve used UDIDs in our licensing system, particularly for developer accounts–they are never used outside of RedLaser. We’re changing our licensing system to use an alternative device identification system.

Two other changes are highlighted in our updated sample application.

First, the RedLaser iOS SDK now supports scanning Codabar barcodes. The most prominent user of Codabar is FedEx, which uses the symbology for its airbills. It is also commonly used by libraries, photo labs, and American blood banks. Codabar can be enabled in a similar fashion as other code symbologies in the SDK. You can also see the other code types RedLaser can scan in our documentation.

Second, we have added a debugging line to our sample application which provides information about the installed license file. You can read more about the testing process here.

Generally, the sample application has also been further updated to highlight some of the more advanced functionality available with the RedLaser SDK. This includes:

• Built-in multi-scan mode
• Multiple scan screen overlay options
• Screen overlay rotation (particularly useful for large code types, like Code 39, which are used for VINs)
• Utilizes both the front and rear facing cameras

Please utilize code from our sample application as a starting point for integrating the RedLaser SDK into your application, and push our software to its limits!

There have also been a number of behind-the-scenes changes. In particular, we have developed a new scanning algorithm which significantly improves performance on older devices.

Older devices have lower resolution cameras (frequently without auto-focus), and this translates into blurry barcodes. The RedLaser SDK now intelligently adjusts its gamma expectations based on ambient light, which lets it quickly pick out the details of blurry codes even in dark conditions.
Finally, we have introduced support for a capture-preview call. Under any circumstances you specify, the scanning SDK will capture a screen-shot of the preview screen right as it successfully completes a scan. You can send these previews back to your servers — functionality which may help coupon applications make sure real coupons (not just print-outs or photocopies) are being scanned.

 

In summary, our new iOS SDK introduces:

• Changes to our licensing system to remove the need for UDID calls
• Improved scanning in low-light conditions
• Improved EAN scanning on iPad 2 and iPod Touch devices
• BarcodeResult now conforms to NSCoding.
• A new sample application, which includes license testing
• Support for Codabar
• Capture of barcode-scanning preview images

If you have a production account, you may download our new SDK immediately from our developer portal.

The first interaction between your customers and your barcode scanner will be in the scan screen. Getting this first interaction right is critical in turning occasional users into frequent users. But getting the scan screen right isn’t settled science, as you can see from some different directions we’ve taken in the core RedLaser application, and in our scanning software development kit.

Even customers aren’t sure what the best scan screen would be.

While we were in the planning stages of a recent RedLaser release, we conducted user research on this topic, among others. In particular, we compared two different scan screens — one primarily with arrows, like the “RL Classic” design above, and the second with solely a red scan line, like RedLaser today. The research subjects overwhelmingly preferred the scan line, as they believed it required far less precision and fostered perception of an easy and streamlined scanning process.

With the launch of RedLaser, we switched our scan overlay, but user feedback and more research surfaced an unexpected result of the change: Users with the new app perceived scanning as slower, even though our testing only showed speed improvements. Our hypothesis is that, because the red scan line is easier to align, our users spend less time aligning the screen and more time waiting for a scan to complete, creating a perception of slower scanning.

To help you figure out the best scan screen for your customers, we’re going to walk you through a few of the important areas we’ve discovered.

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