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Alcatel-Lucent Technology Allows Mobile Phones to Read Barcodes

Touchatag’s RFID reader and markers.

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Imagine walking by an ad for a sports team and being able to purchase tickets on the spot. Touchatag, an Antwerp, Belgium-based unit of Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), is a technology venture seeking to make that happen. The venture aims to make an open interface for the creation of a wide range of applications for consumers to access, says Anthony Belpaire, general manager of Touchatag.

Wave a smartphone at an ad, and the mobile browser automatically loads the Website to purchase tickets or gets a live representative on the line to take an order, Belpaire explains. With a built-in radio-frequency identification (RFID) reader or a 2-D bar-code reader to scan the Touchatag marker from 1.6 inches away, users can make purchases, watch related videos or access more information on the phone, Belpaire says. Some phones from Nokia Corp. (NOK), Motorola Inc. (MOT) and Kyocera Corp. (KYO) come with built-in RFID readers, and any phone with a built-in camera and the installed Touchatag application can scan 2-D bar codes, Alcatel-Lucent reports. “With a phone, you can link to a whole set of contactless applications,” he says.

Belpaire adds that more than 3 million mobile phones in the U.S. now have the capability to read Touchatag bar codes, compared with 60 million phones in Japan. By 2012, he says, more than 40 percent of U.S. mobile phones will have the technology.