RedLaser was released on May 15, 2009. It works with original, 3G, and 3gs iPhones (although it is faster on 3gs). It was released for the pure need for that scanning barcodes was very subpar on the iPhone. They were the first (and I think still the only, most others license their tech) app on the iPhone to do barcode recognition straight on the phone (no need to take a picture or send it to a server to be 'read'). Until very recently that wasn't possible with horribly slow Android SDK.
Read Occipital's story on their blog http://occipital.com/blog/2009/08/01/2009-at-occipital-from-...