All About Mobile Life has alerted me to Moji-Q Maker. It lets you make custom-colored QR-codes with text embedded in them. Very cool.
Update
Actually, my AU keitai does not seem to recognize the meta-data in the code. It recognizes the URL, but appends two semi-colons to the end of the URL, which gets a blogger 404. If I could encode a URL only without the title, etc. then it would work perfectly.
Here's a couple handy extensions to view a QR-code for any URL with Firefox.
Orange has decided to use Abaxia's MobileTag technology as their barcode format of choice and will begin preloading scanners on their handsets and using the codes to drive traffic towards promotional and premium content. The codes are being marketed as Flashcodes.
You can make your own Flashcodes (for contact information anyway) at the MobileTag Beta website if you register or at Orange's contact code creator.
At Orange FR's site you can naturally only create a contact code for a French number.
Oh, and if you happen to be French and living in The Netherlands you should definitely check out www.thefrenchtouch.nl.
Children's phones have been present for a few years, but now all four main wireless carriers in Japan have all started marketing keitai for children. Docomo has their Kid's Keitai, KDDI has their Junior Keitai, Softbank has their Kodomobile, and Willcom has their Papipo.
These phones come with parent-oriented features like limited web access to kid-safe sites, white lists for numbers calls can be received from or made to, location maps to track you child's position and panic buttons that sound alarms, call a pre-set number and start taking pictures and collecting GPS information to automatically send to the parents phone by email. Wireless Watch Japan has a nice article about mobile phones for kids in Japan. There's also a video interview with AU Designing Studio's Manager Natsuko Kimura where she demonstrates some of the features of KDDI's keitai's for kids.
A code-based approach to SMS voting. Smart subscribers can scan the code of the contestant they want to vote for, and apparently receive an MMS containing a picture of their contestant of choice. The Decode codes used by Smart are based on Nextcode's mobile barcode technology. The Binibining Pilipinas website appears to be down at the moment, but here's a pic of the promotion.
Thanks to Symblogogy for covering this in the linked article. I checked out the web site and press release of Denim Code's 2D barcode-branded jeans marketed as "The Original Interactive Pants". Hmmm.
I've seen lots of t-shirts and baseball caps with QR-codes and barcodes on them, but I think 2D barcodes are really becoming hyped up as marketing tools now, which is pretty cool since there are some pretty imaginative things you can do with them. In this case I think it is kitch that is the main attractor, but the codes point to mobile video contents so as the content gets passed around, their concept and brand get promoted. The codes appear to be based on Abaxia's MobileTags.
Actually, if for each piece there are multiple codes to chose from it might encourage multiple purchased as customers start to collect. Clothes with personalized messages in the code would be cool too.
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.
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.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.
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.
