One of the toughest pieces of technology to explain to everyone outside of Japan is the “Quick Response” or QR Code. These little black, scannable boxes are EVERYWHERE in Japan - from billboards to McDonald’s hamburgers. They all have one single objective in mind - to allow easy information to be entered into your mobile camera phone.
While volumes can be written on how the Japanese are using this technology and how YOU should know about it if you are thinking of ever marketing TO Japan, let me introduce this item through a NON-JAPANESE company.
This week TheTechMonkey (also in Japan) put me on to an interesting little company called Augme offering the service of placing QR codes on t-shirts and other items. While this unto itself is not so new, what I DID find facinating was how the company organized it’s website to not only have the ability to create your own QR Code, but to be able to point it in any direction such as photos, videos or even just plain text if you would like to share it as a business card. This, coupled with the ability to invite and share with friends makes it smell very familiar - that’s right, the making of a social network revolving around the QR Code. Wow!
If ever there was a time for you to kick the tires and see if the idea of producing a small blocky code for your content to be easily entered into a mobile camera phone, now would be a good time to try.
Of course it helps if you HAVE a phone which can carry the QR Code software itself (many Nokia models internationally do). If you don’t, you’ll end up having to call a friend in a country such as Japan to find out if it works or not (sorry - please don’t ask).
When the moon and galaxies become aligned and consumers start demanding this feature with vendors happy to supply it, the QR Code will truly be a universal tool. Right now it really is only for those who reside in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Tags: blognation, Japan, blognation Japan, QR, Scan, Codes, QR Code, QR Codes, Augme, Augme.com, Japanese, mobile, cameraphone, camera phone
October 31st, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Interesting - i have played with Semacode which is free (for non commercial use) and provides QR Code software.
Due to the commercial aspects i wrote my own simpler version that would print a shorter code, but still be recognized simply via a mobile phone camera. Still, my application was for an internal security system and it needed more investment to get to where Semacode is.
I did consider exactly this use, so much so i prototyped it. There are some German companies using it in magazines.
Still as for a popular social application you are spot on it needs (a) for people to have the software and (b) for people to KNOW they should do X when they see such a code.
I personally think (b) is the bigger challenge. Still for closed apps it has potential.
November 1st, 2007 at 2:05 am
Steve from Ubit writes a lot about interesting QR Code stuff.
Also, What Japan Thinks just had a post about QR code usage in Japan. It’s much higher than I thought!
November 1st, 2007 at 6:36 pm
QR codes are a nice technology. If you want to experiment with it there is the Kaywa reader (http://reader.kaywa.com/) which can be installed on Java phones, like my Sony Ericsson k610i. Potentially any mobile phone that has a camera (which in practice must be all of them now) can take a snap of a QR and turn that into a telephone number or URL. It’s a really fast way of navigating to information about a product or service using a mobile.
I’ve seen recently that some companies are experimenting with putting RFID readers in handsets in order to turn product information (embedded in RFID tags on products) into a URL or numbers. This seems crazy to me, to add even more radio hardware to mobile handsets just to provide the same functionality as QR, when nearly every handset could already do the same just through adding a Java applet.
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