Pivot: Automatically Offering Information and Services to Real-World Shoppers

Shoppers with an Internet-enabled computer have a wealth of product information available to them. By browsing to a variety of Websites, users can conduct searches and compare prices, read reviews, and learn more about a product. These sites are pivot points for a user; once they are at Amazon.com's landing page, for example, they can navigate outwards to a million different products. The idiom of browsing to a central page for a site and then navigating outwards is acceptable when browsing is convenient, with large displays and useful input devices. This process becomes inconvenient, however, when the user is out and about in the world. We have built a system, Pivot, that uses physical objects as pivot points for the user. Specifically, Pivot uses the 1-D barcodes present on every product to deliver powerful services and options to a user on his or her cellphone. These services are chosen to be most useful to a user in the moment and trying to make a purchase decision. This paper describes the motivations for the system, the system itself, its current real-world deployment, and our intended future work.