The Fascinating World Of Mobile Tags
Sometimes the industry launches solutions for problems of which the public hardly knew that they even existed. That can be one aspect of marketing power. More often there are no satisfactory solutions available for problems everybody concerned knows about, but has stopped thinking about because…. well, because there are no satisfactory solutions. That’s a deficiency. And in some rare cases there are solutions available that work, extend the usability of existing devices, do not even cost anything extra… and that somehow keep flying under the radar. That’s plainly strange.
2D matrix codes (also called mobile tags) that can be scanned by smartphone cameras are of these last-mentioned categrory – while they already are reasonably popular in Asia, they are largely ignored in Europe and the United States. Why this should be so is absolutely beyond me. Mobile tags can encode free text, address-book information, or website URLs. No more tedious, error-prone typing to transfer information into your smartphone; if you have a mobile tag app installed, just activate it, point the camera to the code, and wait a second until your phone has decoded the information and will either store it in the contact list, take you to the website, or display text.
Starting two weeks from now all our people will carry business cards with their individual QR Codes to supplement the human-readable contact information on their business cards. Same thing with our digital corporate presentation.
However, we see many other applications that would enable us to serve our customers better. The idea is that mobile tags are in fact the first step to “smart objects.” While these are not yet elements in the Internet Of Things that is envisaged for future years (because they can communicate only with the user, not with each other, and not bidirectionally), such objects are good for much more than just lying around or being displayed on a screen. For instance, think about printed documents that point the reader to the digital version or to related content on a website. Think of automated look-ups in online databases. Think about promotional campaigns that provide automatic feedback. Think….! And make a start by perusing the Microsoft Tag on the left sidebar of this blog. It encodes H.M. Pharma Consultancy’s contact information.