QR Codes start to catch up in US
August 25, 2009 • 7:47 pm • POSTED BY Tammo WalterWhile mobile phone readable QR (Quick Response) bar codes are widely used in advertising and public life throughout many Asian and European countries they are still fairly unknown and unused in the US. Unfortunately since the codes offer quick and easy connections to mobile content while somewhere on the go.
The 2D matrix bar codes were developed in 1994 for high speed content decoding purposes by the Japanese corporation Denso-Wave, a global automotive components manufacturer. It is an open royalty-free format that allows the storage of content such as phone numbers, text messages, v-card data and URLs.
So, if you want to send someone from a public wall posting to a big brand landing page it’s not a big deal to type in a URL into your phone but if you want to drive traffic to a specific page somewhere buried deep within the interactive architecture the squared codes come in handy. No one ever types a 20 character URL into a cell phone browser let alone the looks of such an URL in print.
Finally it seems like the use of codes here in the US catches up and people are interested in it. With 27000 google searches for the keyword “QR code” in July (US) it shows there is some interest. Ok, it can’t compete with 151000000 US searches for “Michael Jackson” in July but QR codes didn’t die a tragic death – yet.
Big brands like Mountain Dew, Nike, Pepsi, Louis Vuitton (picture below) and others did already or slowly start getting into using the codes for various marketing reasons. A good example how to use them was set by online toys retailer MyToys.de earlier this year (click on link to see video documentation). They created a successful campaign to promote and sell a specific LEGO kit. Or part of a current marketing initiative for Tim Burton’s new film “9″ for example connects you from a poster on the street to an exclusive quicktime movie about the film online.
Hend S. Al-Khalifa from the King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia suggests to utilize the codes to guide blind or visually impaired people. Reading the code off from an object would trigger the phone to fetch an audio file with further information.
And this should be just the beginning. It’s not hard to imagine that once more and more in use it will infiltrate all kinds of areas in our daily live going way beyond just advertising. About 92% of all cell phones nowadays are equipped with a camera –in combination with a free mobile reader application– the most fundamental tool to decode the squares.
On top of all the QR code development a group of researchers from the MIT just introduced the bokode. A tiny code system that consist of a LED, and a tiny mask with a lense. But that is a separate story for another time (or check out the link for more info below).
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