I love QR Codes on paper.



The Seminars organized by SMI will be held from 10 to 16.30 at Ringier-Presshaus in Zurich. On February 22, we start with MMS and SMS Campaigns. On March 29, we will continue with Mobile Barcodes.

Technokitten:

But you know what, bluecasting will be an interim technology at best. At some point in the near distant future, we will be always on on our mobiles with wap access, flat rate data charges, pre-installed QR code readers and phones that just work. In that scenario, we won't need bluetooth to file share, we'll just do it over the air, like we do from our PCs. We'll take a picture of a QRcode, it will link us to the wapsite and we'll download away to our heart's content and maybe even share with a friend via the 'send to a friend's phone' link.

Especially with 1 billion mobile broadband users in 2009 (see post below).

I missed that earlier, thanks to the Techno / Marketer I found it now.

The MMA’s Mobile Advertising Guidelines (PDF) provides the formats, guidelines and best practices to implementing mobile advertising initiatives. All parties involved in active mobile advertising programs should be familiar and compliant with Mobile Advertising Guidelines and their practical implementation.

The Mobile Advertising Guidelines includes the following sections:

• Mobile web (WAP) Banner Guidelines
  
  • Mobile web advertising overview
  • Mobile web (WAP) advertising units
  • Advertising examples
  • Technical specifications
  • Mobile web response mechanisms overview
• Content Guidelines
• Technical Requirements for Mobile Advertisers
• Nomenclature (Glossary)
• Who We Are

In September MobileMonday reported that China Mobile offers train e-tickets with QR-Codes. I checked CTTL for an update, but didn't find anything. Does anybody know if they already started?

China Mobile plans to test a train ticketing system using its bar code e-commerce service QRcode in Beijing in October, reports National Business Daily.
With the correct handset QRcode, users can get on trains without having paper tickets.

I suppose it is not so much the direct code scanning which plays a major role but rather receiving a WAP-Push link via SMS to get a QR Code ticket on the device.

The Mobile Identity Workshop is just over and I couldn't attend. So I went first to check the blog of John Palfrey (whom I know back from 2003 when we co-hosted one of the first blogging conferences before they where named that way;)

As this the mobile ID topic is a central one to us, I would have liked to participate in it, but SF was just too far away. So far the most interesting post concerning the workshop was the one from Urs Gasser.

I don't know how many other readers of this blog think about mobile identity, but I think it's one of the most important topics today, especially when seeing this Nokia slide from Tero Ojanpera, Exec VP and CTO of NOKIA: Over 1 billion wireless broadband subscribers by 2009. Up to 90% of the 6 billion will have mobile coverage by 2010.


Related:
Interoperability in the new digital ID infrastructure (PDF) (Local copy)

By accident I found this (see my earlier post about QR Codes at MIDEM):

Japanese Promote Music With QR Codes

The J@pan Inc Music Media Watch Newsletter has an interesting feature about the increasing use of QR codes to promote music in Japan (QR Codes being a two-dimensional barcode). “Many mastertone and full-song mobile download sites have magazine tie-ups in which a QR code is included in an article or advertisement to provide a free song or listening sample. Local indie bands include a code on their flyers linking to their mobile sites. Several CDs here include codes that link to ‘extras’ such as mastertones, videotones and artist wallpaper.” It seems to be a good way for indie artists to offer samples of their music.

See also: Yesterday MIT Advertising Lab also wrote an article about QR Codes used in Japan.

When we started Feed2Mobile some weeks ago, we thought about offering an easy and straightforward way for people to get from a blog to a mobile website - with a QR Code on top - to offer a similar experience as with the mobile Kaywa Blogs. Although the mobile Kaywa blogs have several additional features like comments, archive, gallery etc., the post content seemed ok for a start.

Our second idea was that people can search existing feeds, create new ones and even bookmark their feeds right on their mobile.

Albeit blogs are still the main content providers, we see some interesting new usage patterns. For one thing there are some blogs or sites which deliver MP3's and 3GP Video's right to your phone. Examples I found interesting were SCIAMBOLA, Today's Blog Music - The Hype Machine, TPN :: The Alternative Music Show for music and as an example Elektrischer Reporterfor 3GP Videos.

Even more interesting though was that french guy from Chronopost which put his parcel's RSS feed on Feed2Mobile. Then there is the weather forecast from West Springfield, Massachusetts or the Earthquakes over 2.5+ at USGS .

Even if Feed2Mobile is still in it's infancy, it seems to give people an easy to use tool and we can learn from their needs.

Finally the Netzguide Business Communication 2007 is out. I wrote an article about mobile tags in the annual publication. I try to show why we need ISO standard 2D barcodes (QR Code, Datamatrix) in the current european barcode babel and what the future will bring.

I also wanted to thank Thomas Bertrand from La Rivière aux Canards for his kind help with the QR code photo.

In June last year, we tried out Spinvox with this blog or rather they tried it out as it was then a UK product only. It was great, but it was not possible to use it at that time for our french or german-speaking clients. Now, for there US Launch they use a Liveblog to do something similar.

With QR Codes, Feed2Mobile and SMS Alerts this could even get more interesting. Let's look if we can meet at 3GSM.

Via Techcrunch

Functioning Form aka Luke Wroblewski did a nice summary about some recent Mobile Design Books.

And in this article from Luke, I found an interesting quote from Don Norman:

“With time, the technology matures, offering better performance and higher reliability. When the technology exceeds the basic needs of most of its customers, there is a major change in customer behavior. Emotional reaction, pride of ownership, and pleasurability all can become major selling points.”

I guess the time of technology exceeding the basic needs of most of it's customers is exactly what we are experiencing at present with telephony 1.0 (calls and SMS). Think RAZR, the LG chocolate and now the iPhone.