Bee Tagg

The Pondering Primate has a nice post about Bee Tagg, one of many 2D codes in the mobile world. Some marketing campaigns that are using of Bee Tagg's codes are referenced as well.
Actually, the Bee Tagg web site has a page with examples of a lot of different code formats. It really seems like 2D barcode technology vendors are paying a lot of attention to the appearance and brand/logo-friendliness.

Moji-Q Maker

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.

QR-code Extensions For Firefox

Here's a couple handy extensions to view a QR-code for any URL with Firefox.

• Mobile Barcoder: Pops-up a tooltip-style window with the QR-Code for the page you are currently viewing.
• QR Code: Uses Javascript to generate a QR-code with CSS.

You can also download some interesting QR-code Javascript tools and libs at D-PROJECT.

Orange Flashcode

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.

Kid's Keitais

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.

Here's a commercial for the KDDI Junior Keitai campaign