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QR Codes - Internet to Cell Phone via Camera
An anonymous reader writes "From ITWorldCanada comes an article about a technology that might change the way people use their cell phones in North America: 'A Toronto-based software developer wants to bring Quick Response (QR) codes to Canada, and an industry analyst says this may appeal to companies offering products and services to youth.' McDonald's restaurants in Japan having been using the codes for over a year to present nutritional information on the cell phones of their customers. QR codes were originally developed by Tokyo-based Denso Wave Inc. and are common in Japan. When published in print form — on billboards, transit ads, vehicles or other media — consumers can then take pictures of the images and have them converted to links, phone numbers or other advertising messages."
Yes this exists in Japan. QR Codes are an "open" patent, the company that owns the patent has published the details so that anyone can implement it and doesn't enforce its patent except for the name.
This means it is IMPLEMENTED on a LOT of phones.
So what does this western company do? Implement it on Windows Mobile 5 or 6.
Eheh, why not implement it on the iPhone and go for an even more limited audience? (Sorry fanboys, but even with its massive success the iPhone is still only a tiny part of the market, although it is possible that with just 1 phone Apple will get a share that reaches while digits)
Hint, MS ain't exactly owning the market for mobile phones, especially those owned by youths. What advertiser is going to include a bloody ugly area in their carefully designed ad that can't be used by 95% of phones. (Getting real market share data from MS in this area is next to impossible, they are very reluctant to release hard figures)
If this canadian company had any smarts they would at least get it to run on Symbian (the majority OS) and preferably do it so that it simply runs on anything that has a camera. That is what the Japanese did.
Without this, this will just be another, it worked in Japan and failed in the west tech stories. Remember i-mode anyone?
I would also try to launch this in europe where carriers are slightly less restrictive about third party software on "their" phones.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I feel like every time I post to Slashdot in the last few months, it's almost been exclusively about my cell phone (I live in Japan).
I bought my phone this summer and the QR is awesome. My au phone bill comes with QRs to the site and this month's free downloads. I just went shopping at the Village Vanguard (like a cooler Japanese Spencer's) and the bag I got for the stuff I bought had three QRs, for directions, info on the store, and other things. I've even used QR on PC websites to access mobile versions of sites.
It's really, really useful, but I think it needs a semi-decent camera on one's phone. I'd love for it to become popular in America, but American phones would have to start supporting it and then others will. While the three major Japanese phone companies are follow each other, getting American cell phone companies to go in one direction is like herding cats. I seriously doubt it'll take off in America.
Don't get me started on the Japanese OCR program, which can take pictures of kanji and passes it on to the Japanese / English dictionary - it's so awesome.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
So that's what those weird pictures are. I have been wondering for awhile what exactly they are as a pretty large portion of housing sales ad's now days seem to have those. (in Finland).
This reminds me of some of the logos I saw in the "ghost in the shell" series
:)
(hmmm I wonder if they actually are QR codes)
would it be possible to get a working tattoo of one of these?
a fun way to stop anyone taking your picture, a tattoo virus on your forehead that places an image where your face would be
Well, it seems to be an enormous success in Japan, and I imagine it will succeed just as much in Canada. You have to have widespread adoption- by cellphone manufacturers, but people who would have a use for QR codes, etc. Example- a Japanese arcade game I play will put up a QR code after the "game over" so that you can post your high score online via cellphone because it would be cost-prohibitive to put the individual machines online (for the arcade owner, mostly). Another use- business cards. That way it's incredibly easy to scan in all the contact info. Third use- small MIDI ringtones and graphics can be encoded in a QR code. All of these mean that QR codes have far more potential for success than the CueCat did.
OSx86 FTW
That's neither open source or a community, its a software development kit that is cost-free, with restrictions, for non-commercial use.
What is more interesting is ZXing (Zebra Crossing) a free open-source J2ME development kit from Google that is part of the Android platform.
And that is where you are completely wrong. Sure the lack of service killed the cue cat, but that was because the lack of cue cats killed demand for the service.
The possibilities of the QR code are not limited to advertising either. You can encode ~4k bytes into a QR code. That is enough for quite a few purposes. Here in Japan almost every mobile phone has a scanner and the QR codes are everywhere. I have seen them encode links to web-sites on posters, address book entries (incl. photo) on business cards and more recently, virtual tickets.
So far, the virtual tickets are by far the coolest use I've seen. The QR code is sent to your phone via email or obtained from a web page. Then you display the QR code on your phone screen and the ticket inspector scans it. No more need to print out plane tickets, cinema tickets or any other form of Id really. I've even seen the system used with shoppers club cards.
There are probably many more uses for this that haven't been thought of yet.