07/8 QR code based travel information service and Kaywa's new SMS Services
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Bureau of Transportation
has been putting QR codes on bus stops around the city and will launch
a new QR code based travel information service on August 10th.
The service provides timetables for buses that visit the bus stop and also has tracking capabilities, informing the passenger how far away the next bus is. The service is also available for phones that don’t support QR codes. Each bus stop has a unique number which passengers can enter manually into the mobile site to receive the same travel information.
In my
last post, I just talked about short codes, now I read the above. Again short codes can also be used this way.
Kaywa also thinks similarly as we also will provide an SMS service which reuses these shortcodes for other stuff. If you happen to live in Switzerland, you can for example send an SMS to
202 with
QR 2020400102 and see what happens. You probably can guess it already.
If you want to see other examples of our upcoming SMS blog service, you can go to
http://jerome.bleublog.ch, scroll down and find the
SMS Blog Services button. I'll soon report more about this new service which includes SMS publishing, SMS alerts and SMS chat.
Via
Wireless World Japan: QR code travel information service launched in Tokyo07/8 Why Short Codes if you have the URL, SMS, Text, Phone Numbers etc.?
QR Codes can be used with URL's, Telephone Numbers, SMS, Text, E-Mail etc. (for an illustration, see the
QR Code Generator). Now the question is, why use short codes as well?
There are several answers to this, but let's first explain how short codes work:
Short codes is a number translated on the server to an URL. Short codes look like that: 2020400102 for this blog. If you want to address a singular post - this one for example - it would be 2020400102501.
They can be directly input in the
Kaywa Reader and you will get the same result as with a QR Code. Just open your Kaywa Reader, click Options and "Enter short code" 2020400102 and you will get to this blog.
PS: Short codes can be shorter if needed.
Why?
- In print where space is scarce, you can imagine the following scenario. A lot of small classifieds in a newspaper can have one general QR Code and then for every individual classified a short code number. This way you can give an easy access to very small items (in a normal newspaper you can find items with a size of 0.5x3.9 cm)
- In print this scenario is already in use, think about NZZimmo (Search with code from NZZ ad) for example, where you have next to every real estate ad in the newspaper a number which on the web you can type in to find more information about the object. With a short codes in your Kaywa Reader, you could now access this same information more quickly and easily without using a desktop computer.
- As we haven't got yet the macro camera phones which are commonplace in Japan, we cannot go as small as 0.9 cm yet. With the short codes however we can provide a QR Code that is at the same time small and always of the same size.
So, how neat is that;)
