James, a graduate of our Multimedia program who is working in Japan came by for a visit and showed me his cell phone and the cool things it can do. Besides controlling things like a Karioke player with the IR port and being an MP3 player, it can scan QR Codes which are two-dimensional barcodes. The barcodes are showing up all over – in magazines to provide a coupon or a URL, on business cards so that you can scan in a person’s contact information, and on screens. The scanning software lets you scan multiple 2D barcodes and then can merge the data into one file so you can suck up little programs for your phone. Above all it seems quite robust – both the QR Code system and, for that matter, the regular OCR with the camera that lets you scan English text.
If you want to try it, this QR Code Generator lets you generate the barcodes. The code above is my contact information encoded for the Vodafone scanner. For more on QR Code see QR Code features or qrcode.com. According to their site, there is no licensing fee to use QR Codes, which may explain why it is taking off.
A related technology that didn’t really work was the CueCat that was a little plastic cat-shaped scanner that connected to your computer. It was distributed to Wired and Forbes subscribers so they could scan barcodes in magazines to get more information or to suck up links. See Wired News: Turning CueCat Into a Cool Cat and Wired News: Camera Phones Help Buyers Beware.
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