I’ve been experimenting with QRCodes. A phenomena that has all but taken over Japan and is making some ingress in Europe and the US. It’s basically a two-dimensional bar code that can hold a lot more data than the old EAN types.
The first site I came to when digging around was Kaywa It allows you to generate QR Codes for URLs, Text, Phone Numbers and SMS Text messages. Heres one I created for the Destinys Agent Facebook page:
You will notice that the above example has a block with a logo and typed information included. This is possible beacuse the QRCode system as error correction built in and can reconstruct missing or corrupted data. I edited it with Photoshop and tested it with Jaxo-Systems Bar Capture, available online and as a freeware download. Jaxo-Systems also provide a bar code generator in the shape of Bar Show also freeware (Simple registration required).
I’m sure that these QRCodes and others like it will become a lot more common very quickly. To get an idea I did a search on Flickr to see just how common they are becoming. Meanwhile, I’ll keep experimenting with uses as ideas come to me.