Alex, my business partner, likes to be disruptive (just ask his 1st grade teacher). His team built the break away iPhone and Android App called ShopSavvy. The iPhone version is the 174th all time most downloaded iPhone app and the Android version is still in the top 10 all time most downloaded Android app. Earlier today his team released the ‘keys to the kingdom’ of ShopSavvy (i.e. their barcode scanning library) for free. You can download the technology behind ShopSavvy for free right now. From the Big in Japan blog:

There never seem to be enough hours in the day to do all the cool stuff we want to do. We have planned on releasing our barcode scanning libraries for quite some time. Many of you have been patiently awaiting their release. I am happy to announce that we are releasing our iPhone Barcode Scanner SDK today.

Our scanner library works really well on all flavors of iPhones (2G, 3G and 3GS). You guys are getting EARLY access to this new library (it isn’t even released on ShopSavvy yet). The SDK support 1D (UPC and EAN) as well as 2D (QR and Datamatrix) scanning.

If you previously requested it I emailed the link earlier today, for the rest of you feel free to download it right now. There is no cost, but you will need to execute our license agreement within 30 days.

• Barcode Scanner SDK (Free): http://bit.ly/scannersdk
• Barcode Scanner License: http://bit.ly/scannerlicense

If you have any questions please email support@biggu.com and include the following information: name of app, description of app, your name, email, phone and your issue. Support will be provided to all licensees (i.e. if you haven’t executed our license agreement please do so before requesting support).

We are really excited to see what you all come up with using our library – definitely keep us posted and let us know if we can help you be successful. There will be a second release of the library next week that includes some additional features (FYI – our license requires that you update within 30 days of a new release).