Toshiba to Show Blog Reviews to Mobile Shoppers

Posted on January 15, 2006

The Asahi Shimbun reports that Toshiba has created software that will let mobile shoppers check blog reviews of electronics, food, books, CDs, DVDs, cosmetics and other products. To activate the search for reviews the mobile phone's camera takes a picture of the bar code on the item.

When the cellphone camera shoots the bar code, the information is automatically sent to a server, which then searches through blogs, or diary-like Web sites, for reviews.
About 10 seconds later, a summary will be displayed on the cellphone screen reporting how many blogs were positive and how many were negative.
The actual comments on the blogs can also be viewed as well as information on related products.
Toshiba categorized about 500,000 Japanese words into fields such as travel and culture, and classified words related to evaluation as good or bad.

It sounds similar to the Opinmind blog search tool we discussed yesterday except more advanced and focused solely on products. Opinmind does give postive and negative reviews on products. Using an iPod Nano search as example, you get 103 positive results and 12 negative results. Search Fritos and you get 12 postive and 5 negative results. Toshiba's software could do something similar to Opinmind.