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Son of CueCat? Purdue Professor Embeds Hyperlinks
rbook writes "Remember :CueCat, the "free" (as in beer) bar code scanner that was supposed to change everything by allowing advertisers (or whoever) to put hyperlinks in printed material? Well, the idea is back, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education: 'People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them. That's the idea behind Sorin Matei's project, Ubimark, which embeds books with two-dimensional codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed.' Photographing an image and uploading it sounds like more trouble than scanning a bar code to follow a URL, but they figure you can take the photograph with your smartphone and view the web page automatically on the mobile device." It looks like standard QR codes are embedded; what Ubimark is pushing is "a publishing environment which combines print books, ubilinks, a centralized Internet based interactive information repository and computer displays."
...if you (like myself and my fiancee) are one of the few people out there that still appreciate dead-tree books, you are also likely one of those people that won't give a fuck about something like this.
Living With a Nerd
>> CueCat, the "free" (as in beer)
More like, "free" (as in Gonorrhea)
Brilliant! All they need to do is force you to register when you want to view the digital content with your photo of the relevant page and include a unique part to the code in the book (so it can't be registered again by a different person) and they've stamped out resales of printed text books too.
Agreed. This "technology" is all over Japan. 90% of advertisements use them. 95% of phones can read them. Stores and venues even have devices to read them off of your phones LCD so you can use ones you find on the web as coupons. This is old tech, and old news.