I read an article this morning that made mention of QR codes, and to be honest, I had never heard of them before. After doing some research, it appears that QR codes are essentially two-dimensional bar-codes that are fairly popular in Japan. A user with a camera phone can simply point their phone at a QR code and, assuming it is QR code aware, will decode the symbol.
QR codes can be used to encode URLs, phone numbers, text information, and SMS messages. So you can have an advertisement and simply put your URL as a QR code. A user passing by could simply hold their camera in front of the code, and it would grab the URL address, all without any typing. It’s interesting that QR codes actually have a primitive form of error correction in them, so small changes in the look will generally still be decoded properly.
Here’s a quick QR code I generated for my website using this cool QR code generator. If you can decode it, let me know:
It looks like that bacon you found under your clothes….or maybe Warlords on the Atari 2600.
Seriously though, check out iMatrix for the iPhone…pretty cool…too bad there isn’t much QR action happening on this continent.
[…] a 2-dimensional barcode made popular in Japan. See the post I originally found this from here, the QR code generator is […]
http://www.duanestorey.com
I have a friend who went to Japan and apparently these are used all over the place – on advertisements, flyers, street signs etc. He said its actually quite useful – for example if you were near a street sign and wanted to find the nearest Starbucks Coffee (other coffee shops are available) then you simply take a snapshot of the QR code on the signpost and then the phone would tell you how to get to one from there. Hopefully this will come to Beijing one day 🙂
This looks like the image that was sent to my cellphone when I did Mobile Check-in before my Air Canada flight last month. Is it the same thing, do you think? Oh, and I think yours says “Beer Time”.
Yeah, QR codes are standard here, and have been for a good few years. I haven’t seen a cell phone that CANT read them. A lot of people even have them on business cards. For that matter, McDonalds even puts them on the wrappers of burgers so you can read nutrition content. Kind of a cool idea in my opinion.