Read about this in the Sun newspaper today. Seems like a really cool application. Basically when your in a shop before you buy something say a TV/DVD player ect you scan the barcode with the Iphones camera. This then connects to an independant price comparison website and tells you if you can get it cheaper else where. It also produces a graph tallying the price of that item over the last few days/months so you can see if it is worth waiting for the price to come down.
http://blog.sccope.com/

This would be awesome to get on the N900. Would this work? im asuming the camera on the N900 is powerful enough seens as it works on the Iphones crappy one.

that would be awesome!

There is a barcode reader application "mbarcode" so the thing missing is the connection to a database, but is coming soon as far as i can rate the maemo community
The author also says he has some connection to amazon iirc, but diabled it.

My webscraping code was not very good (not my forte and written quickly in C), we're in the process of porting mbarcode to use Qt, which will allow people to write plugins using Python (easier to write, seems to have better webscraping utilities available), so once that's done I hope people will start writing webscrapers and other plugins to handle the barcodes that are decoded.

How hard would it be to take the info read from the bar code and perhaps pass it to a web url like

http://www.pricewatch.com/search?q=red+october

(A search for Red October obviously )

That would be a good temp measure until the webscrapers were in place.

There are two bits, first whatever website you use has to take an EAN (UPN) as an input, and then you need to parse the output.

Certainly not rocket science, but my hacky Amazon code was segfaulting so I removed it so the rest of the app was more usable.

barcodepedia is an option, or Amazon (possibly through the webservices api to make the parsing easier), and there are more.

If people are interested in doing some work here, either in writing EAN/UPC lookup tools, or apps that will use the barcodes (perhaps using the previously mentioned tools) then please pipe up. We need to work out an api to register and allow other plugins to use lookup services, etc. and also to give them, optionally, a window to do their thing in.