An article relating to this blog post on Finextra:
Mobile coupon and ticketing on the rise - study
A new study released by Juniper Research predicts that retailers will have issued almost three billion mobile coupons to customers by 2011, with just under $7 billion of discounts redeemed.
See article
Retailers can have a Mobile Phone as an Optical Reader capable of reading paper codes/coupons and reading Mobile barcodes - the cost of such a unit can be less than Euros 150.
With the right program and application behind the reader it can do a whole lot more than simply reading money off coupons (mobile or paper and paper is going to remain prominent for some time.) Enabling retailers to easily and quickly scan coupons with secure
barcodes, an application that handles the data through to payment without them having to fill their tills with tear off coupons and all that paperwork goes with getting their money back - has got to be worth considering by all parties.
Optical Reading application as described above are already possible and working (http:www.upcode.co.uk) By reading paper and mobile codes it provides a cost and time efficient solution that can be used now with codes on any printed surface or material, can
read mobile codes on-screen and can also handle NFC with RFID tags too - what's the hold up?
Mark