Colorzip

Ok, so I started blogging after being in Asia and Europe for four rather important years in the evolution of mobile technology, so my blog posts are a little late to the party. I had heard about colorzip about a year and a half ago or so (I remember seeing some in Korea) and thought they were pretty cool. Here is a "standard" colorzip pattern.

Colorzip provides a hybrid reader that can scan colorzips and QR-codes, so I finally downloaded the client to my AU W42SA and got to work finding sample codes to scan. It seemed to work rather well, so I looked into how it worked on the company web site:

The matrix of blocks and analog data pertaining to the number of colors are digitized and then processed by a dedicated server using addresses registered for the codes.
A typical ColorCodeTM interaction flows like this: First the ColorCodeTM is authenticated. Next the number associated with the code is transferred to the server. Finally, the content is transferred to the mobile device or PC.

So it looks like the code itself is only a reference to the actual information, a URL for example, and not the URL itself. I guess this is so Colorzip can control the usage of their technology. Shotcodes also work like this, but from what I can tell they also transcode the site for mobile devices (high, medium and low optimization). Color codes are cool and the code gallery on the Colorzip web site shows some great marketing potential.

Note: I believe these codes are only samples and will not work.

Even so, it seems less cool to me than codes that actually carry the data within the code like QR-codes or mcodes.