Scandit: Free Social Shopping iPhone App

Launched today, Scandit is a free social shopping app offering barcode scanning, price comparison and sharing capability to popular social networking sites. Samuel Muller, CEO, Mirasense, showed me a demo of his product a few weeks ago, I was impressed by the speed of the scanning technology and the large number of vendors from which you can compare prices. (Check out our video above – the official demo video is at the end of the article).

RedLaser is touted by many people as one of the best barcode scanning app for the iPhone so, I tested Scandit against it: the bar code scanner is better, with Scandit, you can capture a barcode even when it is not positioned horizontally, and RedLaser is unable to do it. According to Mirasense CEO, only his company’s technology is capable of doing it.

Both services provide a long list of prices from multiple vendors and access to reviews. For the 2 Logitech products I scanned, Scandit returned over 99 users reviews directly in the application and Red Laser provided 5 expert reviews for the Harmony 650 but I had to load the AlaTest webpage to read them, which is not as convenient. Additionally, RedLaser does not have any social networking or sharing features, unlike Scandit. Once you have scanned a product you can post it, share your opinion, ask for feedback or brag about your purchase on Facebook and Twitter.

Knowing that RedLaser scanning technology is used by many other apps, I wonder if developers will now opt for the one of Scandit: watch the video produced by the company that “demonstrates Mirasense patent-pending scanning technology, which clearly outperforms established technologies such as RedLaser”.

Check out the official Scandit demo to learn about all the features.