The Smart Mobs weblog points to an interesting service which will be launched in Australia before the end of the year. Basically, the company will send your mobile phone a SMS message which will be a picture message of a barcode. That barcode will be scanned and the various data housed in it will allow you to go to the event you bought a ticket for.
I was thinking of something very similar the other day after reading Matt's mini-rant on the silliness of keeping around paper receipts and the response from Matt Webb about the receipts being primary keys to a distributed database..
What if a company offered to send an encrypted copy of the receipt to your mobile phone/PDA/etc? There would be some basic metadata available to read so that you knew when/where you bought the item(s) but everything else would be encrypted. Then if you needed to take something back, you would either send the receipt back to a special address or use Bluetooth to transfer the file to the cash register.
I'm sure there are tons of holes in this but the idea has struck me as kind of cool.
Posted by Josh at November 8, 2003 01:30 AM | TrackBack