Playing tag

Ever seen those black and white pixelated squares on something and wondered what it was?

Well it is a cousin of the ubiquitous bar code that we seen on every consumer product. Like the bar code, when scanned it gives you additional information about the item you are looking at. But rather than just telling you exactly what the product is, it opens the door to a whole array of e-content.

Unless you have very good pattern-recognition skills, you won’t be able to decifer it without a QR scanner on a smartphone. If you have an Android or a Symbian phone you may already have the necessary app pre-loaded, otherwise download it from your favourite app store, then all you need to do is launch it and scan the code using the phone’s camera. What happens next is the clever bit: it can take you to a website or a place on a map, launch an email to a specified address, send a SMS text message to a mobile phone number or even take you to the latest cool app in an app store.

QR codes, or Quick Response codes, have been used in Japan for years due to their much earlier adoption of smartphone technology. It is very common to see them in adverts in train or tube stations and magazine adverts. It is a way of taking you from the real world to the internet work without trying to write down some impossibly long web address or email. So some people call it a ‘hardlink’ or even a ‘physical world hyperlink’.

It has all sorts of potential uses. Clearly using them in magazines, newspapers and adverts is a great way to convert your physical world content into e-content and possibly make it go viral, as people share the link/address/app with all their friends on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Combining it with a mobile payment system would be the killer application; bored commuters could actually purchase the advertised product right there and then, with delivery of a physical product to their physical world address.

It could also be used in the tourism industry by instantly giving you web content on a whatever you are looking at, be that the Grand Canyon or Big Ben.

In education it could be included in textbooks so students could read about a topic and then be taken to an online simulation where they get to apply that knowledge in an example real world scenario. For organisations, it could be a way of taking employees  from a blanket email or some desktop-based e-learning to some interactive e-content that they can access on their smartphones. So you can extend the message from outside the work environment onto their personal devices. For people working remotely, it is a very effective way of encouraging mobile learning using people’s smartphone.