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You ask a reasonable question and deserve an answer.
1. This is Android, not Windows, so there is no possibility of using Windows services? "WindowManager" is an Android class and API. As someone else says, even if this were a separate process (like a daemon) that would be local, not remote anyway.
2. This class is only used from SearchBookContentsActivity, where it is used to retrieve book search results. After scanning a book, you can search for terms within the book. You can verify this is all it is used for. It is not involved in barcode scanning, nor resolution of barcode contents, which was the question.
No. This is just direct, flatly not what the patent says. You cannot claim the 048 patent means "URL" where it says "ID". Since the patent distinguishes the two, you can't argue it means the same thing. It means what it says and covers only what it says.
You know I think it is fair to say what I agree with here. Since I'm hanging out here anyway.
Any company that offers comprehensive mobile marketing campaign services, including barcodes, stands to do well. I agree, this should be a growth area. That includes Neomedia, companies using indirect barcodes. Provide enough of a value-add service and of course you will profit. For that reason, I am sure not bashing NEOM -- but this is where I would look to for revenue.
My claim is that you can do all of this with HTTP 302 redirects as well -- track clicks, user location, locale, etc. None of that requires new params -- this comes from IP address, standard HTTP headers like User-Agent and Accept-Language. As a service provider, of course, you could define more params if you liked to pass into your tracking system.
Nobody has been able to contradict this. In fact this is already what mobile analytics applications do outside the barcode world already, and it works fine. But that doesn't mean the indirect model doesn't work -- on the contrary, functionally, they are quite similar.
The reason I don't believe in the indirect model right now is interoperability. As a marketer, if I launch a campaign with Neomedia, even if I use QR Codes, 99% of the readers out there that are not Neoreader will do nothing with them. Users see a number and scratch their heads and move on. That would be absolutely unacceptable to me as a marketer! I mean, come on, be realistic. Would you *ever* sign up for such a service?
That is why efforts to standardize the indirect model are important to making that model at all viable. And that seems to be happening.
In the meantime... as a marketer... I can launch a campaign that tracks results and all that, with no licensing, that works on any QR Code readers out there (including Neoreader -- but not Scanlife! can't believe that thing won't read non-Scanbuy codes). That is simply hard to compete with -- unless you have *such* an amazing platform. You decide whether you believe this can win out.
I still don't buy the security argument: how does a model where your data always goes through a third party become more secure? well, you have heard the arguments and can decide for yourself.
You are at least forthright enough to admit what you do and don't know. My issue is not with the blogger's post, since it is accurate, but with your inference, which was incorrect.
To answer your question, the barcode image is decoded on the device -- not sent to a server for decoding. The result is a URL, directly -- not an ID, nothing is resolved against an external server. There is no server. I understand you aren't in a position to read the code, but it is open-source -- you could verify this or ask someone else to if you cared to. This is all open.
Now... if you accept there is nothing resolving against any server... what do you make of a patent that plainly involves a remote server? can it possibly relate to this. I know I know, we're not lawyers.
I just don't get why people feel so confident screaming 'infringement' when they can't answer the paragraph above. Something's fishy.
I continue to 'clutter' the board with this question since people keep cluttering with claims that this stuff infringes. I don't appreciate it, since it's *my project's* IP, not Neomedia's. But it is also misleading to investors about acquisition possibilities, and this board should be about truth for investors.
Did you miss a "without" in the text? read again.
"without communicating with a server"
I'll be really interested to hear who has this server, since it's not the project.
Once again, I wonder how it is one has anything to do with a patent involving a remote database when there is not even a remote server involved.
Just giving you information that may help you be less surprised about what actually happens.
I'll make myself useful and answer this part. The iPhone doesn't really provide a way to capture from the camera's video feed directly. Instead, what you can do, is trigger a photo capture API. When you do the iPhone takes over and you see this screen where you are prompted to line up, capture, and save, before returning to the app. So the reason it looks the same is that this screen is part of the iPhone OS and about the only way to do it. (It's how we did it too -- same screen.) I think that may be changing soon, or else, people have found ways around it -- look at Optiscan. They claim to have enabled a continuous-scan mode which would mean going around this API somehow.
Correct (since 2008) and correct (I am in London vs. New York where Finance is based). But of course, at the time that any investment was seriously considered in barcodes, I was there and involved in the decisions. I explained why Neomedia never considered, and the reason still holds. Your friend street's faux-pas made sure that anyone who cared at the time had a bad impression of this company.
Since that time, Google has left the print ads business, which was the primary reason to actively invest anything in barcode technology. They'll use barcodes here and there to enhance existing products (e.g. Google Maps -> beam directions to phone, sharing contacts on Android). But, why would Google try to acquire a barcode-related marketing firm when it just built its own solution, then shut it down? They would have done this 2 years ago, and they didn't.
(Let me guess. It was part of some plot to... push down share prices here? or is it up? I forget. Or, they shut it down since they realized, oh, we can't compete with this indirect model!)
I still have close ties to the couple people there who work a little on barcode-related stuff here and there. Certainly, I know more than you both do. And I am telling you, virtually nobody even knows this company.
I wish I had better news to bring you. I am trying to give people information who are considering investing on some idea that this company may be about to be acquired by Google.
Take it as you will. Hey, who knows, anything is possible in this crazy universe! How likely do you think it is, though, that I am utterly wrong, and you aren't, given our backgrounds?
Most barcode readers, include Barcode Scanner, will not directly open a URL without prompting you, for two reasons:
1) There is more to do with a URL than just open it -- perhaps you want to bookmark
2) Security. You don't want to go to a URL that you can't see. If you're suggesting some readers just take you blindly to the destination URL, yikes.
I agree, nobody has a patent claim on encoding URLs in a barcode except Densowave, arguably (patenter of QR Codes), and they do not exercise it. Neomedia does *not* have a patent on "using a camera phone to click on a 2D code" in general. These sorts of inaccuracies are wrong and damaging.
I'm not sure anyone is 'skirting' anything here. Virtually everyone in the industry is just using these open standards as designed. Even Neomedia could not attempt to patent open standards that predated their own existence, so they patented some other stuff, that never really got used.
It's like I patented some kind of slightly-different hyperlink back in the 80s, and then am shouting at the world about how the internet is out there actively skirting my IP!
Yeah, totally missed the year on that page. The quote does not have any relevance then to today. I don't know why the discrepancy then but good if people have written to inquire about it, since they'll check with their data providers. Could be a simple glitch -- the 10K was filed after its normal filing deadline, NT notwithstanding, so maybe that triggered this somewhere. In any event, trust me, nobody even knows this company at Google, let alone intentionally doing anything to the ticker.
They aren't, any more than the contents of any barcode can be changed after it's printed. What it leads to gets changed: the URL encoded can redirect to another URL. This has been noted over and over on this board. Go look up "302 redirect".
fuego your posts on this topic are full of incorrect information. It deserves a correction.
- Google has never created or backed its own barcode format. Google has always backed QR Codes.
- Google created the 'zxing' project, which encodes and decodes QR Codes (among other formats). It was created specifically to support this format, for use in print ads
- The Barcode Scanner application is effectively, then, Google's reader. Many readers exist on Android though (not NeoReader for some reason?)
- Does it work? Look up 'barcode' on the Android market. 15 of the 19 barcode apps you see there use Google's zxing project. You can judge
- At the Google I/O conference in question, the zxing project from Google was used to encode the QR Codes
- http://googleio.appspot.com/qrhunt leads you to download Barcode Scanner, from Google
Hope that helps. I am not sure then, in what sense, Google is not using its own reader.
OK, but where do you get that this doesn't mean the OTC market still marks the ticker in this case? I am no expert in this area, but in point of fact the 10K was not filed by the usual deadline, so convention is... mark the ticker?
I suppose my point is, why is this quite plausible explanation discarded in favor of weird conspiracy theories? Google doesn't manufacture this data anyway, they get it from third parties.
Why did Yahoo mark it as such too?
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=neome.ob
They did so until April 4, just after the Mar 31 deadline when the 10K was not yet filed. Could be a mistake, could be that Google is ahead. What I am sure of is there is no conspiracy going on. Trust me nobody at Google is even thinking of Neomedia.
OK hangdog, cool theory. Now look at this:
http://googleio.appspot.com/qr/
That QR Code is direct. It encodes exactly what the picture says. Hm, what's going on?
It is as if somebody has an ability to record when a URL is accessed!?
Yes, you got me. I hatched this Byzantine plot to hide this stock by changing it to NEOME. Nobody has noticed and corrected it except you detectives. Even though I am not an employee, not even on the same continent. Quite obviously, I cannot, and did not, have anything to do with this.
Here's a better explanation: it's correct. The 10-K must be filed within 90 days of fiscal year end. FY2008 ended December 31, 2008. They filed the 10-K on April 14 2009. Anyone care to explain how that's not late?
Hi, I've stopped in again to see how you are doing in these interesting times.
You realize QR Codes there were generated by this 'zebra' project I work on, and that its primary function is encoding/decoding QR Codes? Well I guess I answered my own question.
It is heartening to see people post about all the interesting uses of QR Codes out there. But I am puzzled since virtually none of them use an indirect model, and nothing to do with this company. For my own knowledge I would love to know about one indirect-model campaign within the last year. I am at least happy to see we all are looking at the same set of news about what is going on out there.
koko, this is just demonstrably false.
Take a look at Google mobile search results. It uses HTTP redirects to track clicks (on a subset of all queries). I assure you, that data was available fast, and had all of the demographic-related info you could want.
Why would you imagine this isn't possible? This has been done for years. It makes me think you guys don't grasp how web marketing works, since you think that this odd ID->URL thing somehow enables these use cases.
Great, um, this was written by Neomedia. :)
What about a URL redirector don't you guys get? I really get the sense you haven't worked much with web applications. You understand there are analytics and marketing companies out there doing this already on the web with URL redirectors?
You guys just posted an example of a direct-model code (Star Trek) that does this 'branching/linking' based on country for instance. How can this be an advantage of indirect? I don't know how much clearer it can get!
What I mean is, I don't have anything positive to say about it. I think it should never have been issue since it seems to fail the non-obviousness test. You don't believe the USPTO should issue patents that fail its criteria do you? didn't think so. So if you thought they issued a patent that failed its criteria, you'd oppose its existence. Good, you understand.
I'm not sure what you don't get about the second part. It is a bad patent in my opinion, but, accepting that it exists, I also argue it covers little. ... what is it you can't make sense of there?
If this is true, it means:
- The stock is undervalued, and therefore, there is a great deal of demand for it
- Someone is keeping down the stock price by continuing to sell to meet all the demand
- This program has been carried on for years
- Therefore this someone had either a whole lot of shares to start, or is massing a huge short position
Problem is, the market of cap of daily trades is under $100,000. This is hardly much demand.
Market manipulation is (well, illegal and) a very short term play -- why would this occur for years?
It means someone is knowingly selling a stock below its 'real' value. What kind of strategy is that? you say it's to keep the 'price' down, but:
The big obvious problem with this theory is that pushing down the price by selling shares does you little good, since to acquire the company, you need agreement of the board, which typically means controlling a lot of the stock. So you're going to buy it back anyway. And you've just shot yourself in the foot by selling away your position (or shorting) cheap, when after such an acquisition is in swing, the stock will become far dearer to repurchase.
In short, this theory is backwards, in addition to implausible.
I don't think we would have done something differently. The QR code decoder was relatively easy and a simple approach worked well. A similar effort towards a simple Data Matrix decoder didn't get too far. The problem is detection.
I have tried in spare time to make small improvements. I think a working solution must be somewhat more complex and I myself don't have the will or time to work on it. Maybe somebody will. In the meantime QR code seems like the somewhat more prevalent format anyway so that is more important anyway.
If anybody 'snubbed' Data Matrix it was me, my fault. While I posted some arguments in favor of QR code, one factor in backing QR code was that we, or I, could never make a Data Matrix detector work well. You can find an alpha quality decoder in the project.
'If what I have heard on iHub is true' - well, I wouldn't take what's posted here as gospel, no. :) I don't see what these statements have to do with one another.
I agree that we all need to care about the court rulings. I don't dispute that. I am still, still asking you to defend the USPTO reasoning for me, not question it. It is OK, I don't think you are going to.
To maybe illustrate my question to you: near my old house there was a big flat clear road, not busy. Speed limit was 30, when 45 would easily be safe. Now, while I don't question that we need speed limits, and accept the limit is 30, and drive at 30 there, it doesn't mean I can't question whether the city made the right decision there. And anyone that tells me the speed limit is right - we can debate it while both driving 30. Make sense?
Nice, well that makes two of you. Any name, qualification to go with that? Any reasoning you can share?
Once again, you shy away from actually discussing the patent. I note you did not respond to any of my messages which argue again infringement. I think you have no argument, and your silence is only weakening your statements to any readers here.
Yeah it was discontinued early this year, and I think is completely gone now. They are no longer in the print advertising business.
As far as I know, Android devices are out in the US and UK, and forthcoming in a couple more European markets and Australia? I've heard figures that suggest it has about 5% of the US market at the moment.
I don't know. It should be pretty easy since they already have Java-based implementations, and, well, my project provides a shell of a client to re-use. Maybe short on engineering resources at the moment?
(Note: ShopSavvy and CompareEverywhere are based on our project, so, a claim about SS and CE is a claim about us here.)
http://www.gomonews.com/neomedia-wins-patent-for-indirect-mobile-barcode-so-what-now/
"I believe it is only a matter of time before we see a licensing agreement between NeoMedia and Google."
http://www.sandira.com/blog/2008/09/shopsavvy-and-mobile-barcoding-what.htm
"I strongly believe that the Google backed ShopSavvy & CompareEverywhere applications are infringing upon multiple NeoMedia patents."
http://architosh.com/2008/11/killer-smartphone-apps-shopsavvy-and-shazam/
"In an effort to educate the public and raise the question of patentability, NeoMedia has multiple patents that cover scanning UPC codes with a camera enabled mobile device to connect to the Internet, comparison shop, and/or retrieve online content."
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2008/09/26/shopsavvy-brings-smart-shopping-to-t-mobiles-g1/
"I wonder if the creators of ShopSavvy know that they are in violation of NeoMedia's patents?"
http://www.gomonews.com/dealoco-and-big-in-japan-partner-for-bargain-hunting-through-mobile-barcodes/
"ShopSavvy will have to license NeoMedia’s patents if they wish to continue operating."
... I mean this broken record goes on and on for miles across the blogosphere.
Well, the CEO of Neomedia said a competing product was rubbish? Quelle surprise! Seriously street...
But actually I do agree, the Nokia barcode scanner deserves credit for having been around a while and being pretty serviceable, but, it is not great software.
Well that's cool, some people on the board now say Neomedia is doing indirect and direct. Why are they doing direct too then if it's inferior? why, if this is not their coveted patented area? You make the call.
Right, well, that is not what the text of the patent says, but I like the imagination. Keyword, ID, ham sandwich -- it still doesn't cover encoding URLs, which is what even this "Neomedia" 2D barcode campaign for Star Trek uses.
I don't have much positive to say about the 048 patent.
Neomedia, I am pretty neutral. I thought Chip was a swell guy. I like NeoReader's ability to read QR Codes and Data Matrix. I think it is in a better position than some of these other companies that only offer a proprietary format -- they seem to have a strategy to offer actual services to marketers, and that is a real, sustainable business model. Neomedia itself has never caused me any trouble.
If 'indirect' means 'encodes an ID which is remotely resolved to a URL' per the 048 patent, then, your post contradicts that directly, since you say you are taken to a URL, not an ID.
I know this is a fact since readers beside Neoreader decode this to a URL.
But the URL you post is not what is encoded either. This is demonstrably false. Decode it; it says: http://stdl.12dld.mobi
Why put forth opinions. This is a matter of fact.
Why? Explain. You would have to argue that the indirect model is a huge advantage. Why so?
I don't ask anyone to accept my word for this -- you can check it yourself. huppo, don't listen to anyone. Just look for yourself.
You are right that we should be clear about the term 'indirect model'. When I say 'indirect model' I mean 'the model where the code encodes an ID, which is remotely resolved to a URL, and is the subject of the 048 patent'. I think this is the common understanding of the term here.
Scan the barcode. Look at what it encodes. It is a URL, not an ID. Already, you can see this is not 'indirect model'. The patent simply, plainly talks about an ID that is resolved. It plainly does not cover a URL being encoded. You can read the patent. I don't know how much clearer it can be.
You want further evidence you can independently check? if it were indirect model, it would only work when using Neoreader, since it is the only thing that can resolve indirect-model Neomedia codes. But, as you can verify, the code works in any reader. (Well, it worked in two I tried.)
Bottom line: it is good that an agency is promoting a QR Code reader. It is positive for your company that it is Neoreader. But nobody here is actually using Neomedia barcode campaign management services based on an indirect model. It is good news for Neoreader though, I suppose.
Is Nokia "working with NEOM"? It looks like an ad agency that Nokia hired is linking to Neoreader -- which is good. I like Neoreader since it will actually read direct-model codes.
What do you think about the fact that Nokia has its own reader? that Nokia's own site actually pushes.
http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/scan.htm
A company may give money to a non-profit organization, sure, subject to their obligations to board and shareholders. Even if Google had said, we agree with the EFF's challenge and want to support their effort, that would be entirely fine from a business, legal and ethical standpoint, if it were not inconsistent with management's duties to operate the business responsibly. (And the public, shareholders, etc. are indeed free to judge that action however they like, sure.) So, yes, I don't see a problem.
May a non-profit accept donations to further its work? Yes. Look up 'charity'.
Your argument here hinges on this idea that this patent is a massive threat, and the two companies are competitors. Nobody at Google has even noticed Neomedia, except for a few of us who had the 'pleasure' of interacting to street, and the few who had the actual pleasure of talking to Chip.
To mis-quote the old saying, "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they are after you." Just because there is a big company and small company doesn't mean they are Goliath and David. Just because you're the little guy doesn't mean you're right. That is poisonous thinking.
You can easily answer this. Look at the content of the barcode. It is a URL, not an ID, and works on any reader. Therefore, not indirect model. You can verify this - don't take my word.
But as you say it managed to customize the response based on your request. Hmm, haven't the marketing experts here been claiming that is only possible with indirect?
What happened, experts?
I too think it is great to see more use of QR Codes. That we all agree on.
I will point out that this QR Code encodes: http://stdl.12dld.mobi
That is, direct encoding. And this URL returns a redirect. ;)
I see $70M debt (all short-term, note) on the last balance sheet. I do think you bring up a decent point for potential investors. Debt is senior to equity. Buying a share is buying a piece of what is left of the company after debtholders are repaid.
You are indeed betting that, over time, it will pay off its debt and it will have something left for shareholders. Revenue was only $1M last year. Even with no expenses... you can tell how long until payoff at that rate.
Don't get me wrong, anything is possible. I understand some here expect a massive jump in revenue indeed. I see a lot of talk about Scanbuy. Let's even say those guys pay a license fee. How much can it be, given their revenue? You would be betting on licensing from a lot more than Scanbuy then.
This is not a difference. The same mechanisms site can use to determine preferred locale or language on the web apply here -- both are simply HTTP requests from a browser.
That is, the target site can look at the "Accept-Language" HTTP header in the request, if present, or, look at the source IP address and look up its location.
An indirect model client could do something similar as well.
Sorry that didn't read right: "bankruptcy too": I meant "too" in the sense that it is another reason I am familiar with this. I did not mean to imply anyone else is going bankrupt "too".
(I am an MBA, and do understand the stock market. The first company I worked for reverse-split anyway on its nosedive into bankruptcy too. I had hoped to add some kind of value that doesn't have to do with patents and such. That's it! it is after all supposed to be about investors here...)