Change doesn’t always have to be huge, small changes like improvement in scanning of phones by laser scanners can have huge upside.

Check out this new technology called Mobeam

From a technology perspective, Mobeam enables POS laser scanners to read barcodes on mobile devices. Light-based beaming technology pulses the phone’s proximity sensor LED to emulate the reflection of a barcode, which the laser scanner interprets as “reading” the barcode. Thus, beaming enables a mobile payment app to effectively process all barcoded promotion and non-cash payment types. In many ways beaming is like Bluetooth, NFC or Wi-Fi, a new method of contactless communication between a smartphone and a receiver, in this case, a laser scanner.

Really cool and promising because it enables phones to transmit coupon and payment information to existing hardware – laser scanner. Challenge as always is scale. There are still too few phones (Galaxy only) that have this tech…