QR Code
Published by Rob Flickenger January 28th, 2007 in Inventions
Here’s a nifty invention I recently encountered: QR Code. It’s apparently been around for years, and is huge in Japan. While it is often used for inventory tracking, support for QR Code has been included on recent camera phones.
If your phone doesn’t yet support QR Code, here’s a free reader you can download that works on many popular phones (mostly Nokia). I had trouble registering on Kaywa’s site, but I found a copy of their reader for my phone (Nokia Series 60) over here. The reader is very fast; just hold your phone up to the code, and decoding takes about half a second.
But what are the codes good for? Subversive tagging, of course. Get stickers made. Post them in appropriate places. You can encode URLs, text, phone numbers, SMS, or even a couple of kilobytes of binary data.
These codes are apparently even showing up in mainstream advertising in Japan. It’s a neat idea, sort of a Cue Cat in your phone. It might be fun to play with QR Codes, at least until FP Code invades and replaces everything with invisible barcodes…
You can make your own QR Codes for free online, or using a software package (such as QR Factory or libqrencode).
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There are other option to consider then just QR. Check out Nextcode’s mCode whic was designed for camera phone optics. QR is an industrial standard that was set up for infrared readers. This post has a good commentary on it: http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com/2007/01/smart-communications-licenses.html