Wall Street Journal Highlights Mobile Bar Codes And Physical World Connection

The Wall Street Journal has a story called All The World's A Page (free for 7 days) that discusses how mobile barcodes and camera phones are making everything "clickable".


The article highlights three of the companies on the Physical World Connection company list, Semapedia, Mobiqa, and ZapCode.

"What you'd be looking at is a Semapedia tag, a printout containing something called a QR bar code. Software on your camera phone will read the bar code just as one of those scanners in a supermarket would, but instead of a price it would decode a link to a Web page on the peer-produced online encyclopedia Wikipedia".

American Alexis Rondeau, 28, one of the duo who dreamed up the nonprofit Semapedia project in 2005, puts it "kind of like turning the world into a clickable Web page."

"Keith Russell, Hong Kong-based business development manager for Scottish mobile ticketing company Mobiqa , says his company has seen the bar code take off in the U.S. as a device to deliver event tickets to cellphones. Singapore Press Holdings has launched a service in the city-state called ZapCode that allows people to access information via a colorful bar code"

This is the second major story highlighting Physical World Connection

Google Maps, Internet Of Things And Mobile Codes

How much longer before Google introduces a site or application, where users can create a 2D mobile code?

Or do they acquire a company with an application that can scan both 1d and 2d codes?

The ability to scan a 1d barcode, create and scan 2d barcodes, could instantly add billions, if not trillions of sites (content) to their database.

Wired Magazine has a story Google Maps Changing We Connect With World that discusses how Google is, and could, link the the physical world with the Internet (Internet of Things) using mobile codes.

The Internet of Things

What if you could walk down an unfamiliar street, use your camera phone to take a picture of a building, and instantly know everything about it, from the architect to the list of tenants. The technology to make common objects clickable, like hyperlinked words on a Web site, is available today in the form of 2-D barcodes.

These digital tags look like empty crossword puzzles. Users create them online, print them out, and paste them around the city. Then anyone with a phonecam can "click" on them. A program on the phone decodes the pattern and redirects the curious pedestrian to a Web page.

One project, called Smartpox, is using these barcodes to build online communities that center around, for example, scavenger hunts and restaurant reviews. Members slap a barcode on a given establishment, and in-the-know passersby can get the dirt on its crème anglaise.


At Semapedia.com, you can drop in any Wikipedia URL to instantly generate a 2-D barcode pointing to the corresponding entry.