Comparison shopping via barcode

This is kind of old news, but the utility of it became apparent to me over the weekend while I was shopping for a new printer. In Japan, you can use the camera on your cellphone to capture the barcode of an item you are looking at in a store, and get an immediate price quote from Amazon Japan. If you prefer the Amazon price, you can order it with a click. An even more useful model would be an aggregation service that lets online merchants bid to sell you the item. I don't know when we'll see this in the US, but when it comes I predict dire consequences for stores like Best Buy or Circuit City.

BTW, I ended up buying an HP printer-scanner-copier (all in one). It is amazing what a couple hundred bucks gets you these days - the thing plugs right into my wireless router and is accessible from anywhere in the house. On the downside, the HP driver CD installed 7000(!) files on my laptop. Because it's a network printer the driver software communicates with the server on the printer (as well as HP servers on the Internet to share photos or other documents with friends and family), sending and receiving large chunks of data. Good luck distinguishing spyware from legitimate stuff in this environment...