We’ve been getting a lot of requests that look like this:

I love RedLaser, but can you please add my favorite site X to your search results?

Can you send the barcode I scanned to site X for logging?

We thought this might happen, so we embedded a feature in RedLaser 2.2 that lets you search any website by barcode. But until now, we haven’t announced the feature.

RedLaser Custom Apps is now live! After you’ve installed RedLaser, check out this page: redlaser.com/apps (best viewed on an iPhone).

Pre-built popular custom apps

Build your own custom app

Your new custom app!

Try building an app by following the instructions and let us know what you think. We’d also love some suggestions for other sites to add to our “popular” custom apps list.

We’re excited to see what RedLaser Custom Apps get built and used!

By the way if you like RedLaser, we also launched two other iPhone application last week -FoodScanner (partnership with DailyBurn), and Snapture (partnership with SnaptureLabs). All three of these apps are doing well – they’re all in the top 100 paid apps on the App Store and RedLaser is at #2!

******* EDIT *************

We just added the option to convert scanned barcodes to UPC if the site you are searching only supports UPC format.  On the RedLaser Custom Apps page, when building an app, simply check the “Convert to UPC” box, and the app you create will convert to UPC before searching.

We believe that the future of mobile search is visual – using the camera in your mobile device to to get information about any object or landmark in your vicinity with no typing necessary. Not only will we recognize things via the camera, we’ll be doing it in realtime and overlaying results in augmented reality fashion. We launched our first mobile visual search application, RedLaser, about a month ago.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve released RedLaser 2.0, which lets you scan barcodes in realtime. This means you don’t have to take a photo, just hold it over a barcode and we scan it from the video feed. It’s available on the App Store, and we’ve cut the price temporarily to $0.99.

Here is RedLaser 2.0 in action:

Currently the realtime mode only works on UPC barcodes (which is most barcodes in the US), but we’ll be adding EAN (books/European barcodes) support soon. We’ll also be releasing a new version of our SDK that gives developers access to the new mode.

Barcodes are just the beginning, look for more mobile visual search technology from Occipital soon.