Mobile Barcode Readers In The US
There’s a number of mobile barcode systems intended to “connect the physical world with the digital world”, to quote Cyriac Roeding of CBS. Most of them simply encode a URL which is read by software on the phone to download information from a WAP page — some of the stories I’ve read imply that even more information is encoded into the code — enough to create a sound track from the data, for example — but that strikes me as requiring a lot more data than can be realistically fit on the space. The story in the NYT spends a lot of time talking about the potential of the technology, especially to advertisers, and even more time talking about all the implementations in all the other parts of the world. It’s not until the second page that the article admits that Verizon, AT&T and Sprint all refuse to confirm they’re considering the technology.
Cell phones reading bar codes have indeed been around for years in Japan and Korea. Unfortunately, the article fails to identify the real new generation of "bar" codes entering the market. There is a new color 3D bar code technology (http://www.colorzip.co.jp/en/) that is starting to take over the market that is by far superior (color pixels mean a lot more data per pixel which means much simpler codes can be read off of TV, print, t-shirts, billboards, etc…). The codes are cool to look at (they can be branding events) and are much more effective. Colorzip has established a presence in the US so hopefully we'll be able to get out of the mobile dark ages soon.