UPDATE (1.4.2008, 10:03 am, Swiss Time):
Thank you for your participation.

The first three, and therefore the three winners are:

• P. Burtovoy, Russia
• J. Fields, USA
• F. Robles, USA

Congratulations!

※ The decoding contest is closed.

***

After yesterday's NYT Magazine article, I like to come up with a tough QR Code;)
Decode this one and send an email with your shipping address to LK. There are three scarves ready to ship.

Search for more QR Codes in this post from Steve Portigal. There are at least three.

Style Decoder by Rob Walker, NYT Magazine, March 30, 2008
Read the full article, I just want to quote the last paragraph:

“The more people discover it, the more creativity we’ll see,” Fischer predicts. At a time when the hunger for things that can be tweaked and hacked and customized seems so pervasive, even a form of bar code can become a kind of medium.

See also:
LK Site
LK Photo Gallery

Question about Mobile Multiplayer Games asked on ForumOxford. Tomi responded. For me Mogi stood out, especially in regard to DokoDare, an upcoming project we are working on.

Mogi - Mobile Multiplayer Game

See also:
Ajit's post about it

Marc Andreesen in The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment:

First, I believe startups often overfocus on their competitors. It's the easiest thing in the world to orient yourself in opposition to another company in the same market, and to plan your actions based on what will cause damage to the competitor or block the competitor from getting business.

In the startup world, that often leads to multiple competitors engaged in a shooting war in a market that's still too small for anyone to succeed.

I think it's much better for a startup to focus on creating and developing a large market, as opposed to fighting over a small market.

Why did the japanese succeed with QR Codes? Because they focused on creating and developing a large market.

New Washington State RFID Law A Far Cry From What Assemblyman Wanted

Next Tuesday, it’s likely Washington state will have a new RFID law on its books, one that will be the first in the nation to make malicious stealing of data via RFID a crime. But the bill is a far cry from what's the bill's assemblyman sponsor had envisioned—and what he says he will still fight to get.

[...] Assemblyman Jeff Morris' original bill was aimed at retailers and would have required prior consent before stores could collect personal data.

What happened? That part of the bill was stripped out in the state senate after what Morris described as extensive retail lobbying efforts. [...] Morris vows to try and pass the law again during the next legislative session.

Social Networks are also under scrutiny by the European Commission. Both moves show that there is increased awareness that the collection of personal data will become the most sensible topic in an ever more networked society.

See also:
ENISA Position Paper Security Issues and Recommendations for Online Social Networks (pdf) by ENISA
European Commission to launch public inquiry into RFID (2006)
VENDOR-DRIVEN Theory: a vendor's conception or mental scheme of something to be done, or of the method of doing it
Do Not Track Legislation Could Change the Ad Landscape

Interesting bits from the Taptu Whitepaper: Making Search Social (PDF) which was sent to me by Stefan Keller. I haven't found yet a place where one can download it easily.

Making Search Social by Taptu

There are four key megatrends that are combining to create the New
Wireless Ecosystem:

• Ubiquitous mass storage + processing power on handsets
• From mobile narrowband to mobile broadband communication
• A revolution in mobile UI
• From walled garden operator portals to open gardens
  

[...] Some observations about Generation Y (born 1977-2000):
In contrast to ultra-individualist X-ers, Millennials are grouporiented
-- meaning that they are less interested in an "army of one"
and more interested in the "watch me become we" alternative.
Group-oriented concepts such as "leave no one behind" may
emerge from the movies (2002 movies Lilo and Stich and Black
Hawk Down both used this phrase) and go mainstream.
(Note from me: This permeates japanese mangas, films and culture. Has this to do with the anime and manga culture Generation Y grew up? Would be an interesting research object for itself.)

[...] The nature of search in this new world
of mobile Internet devices will shift. This is because the journey that
Generation Y is taking on the Internet is more concerned with social
expression than finding information.

[...] There are four key aspects of “mobile search made social” which we will
review in the next four sections of this White Paper:
1. Social-assisted relevancy scoring
2. Easy sharing of search results
3. Human editing of search results
4. Crawling and indexing social info

[...] Social-assisted relevancy scoring
Level 1: Relevancy in general – what the world thinks is important
Level 2: Relevancy in your friends group – what your friends think is
important
A mobile search engine that operates at Level 2 requires a search engine
that can access your social graph and boost the ranking of search results
that your friends have deemed to be important. It would preferentially
show results that were more fun and more relevant to you in your social
context. For Generation Y, this would be a significant benefit.

See also:
Mobile Context by CEOrtiz

I will participate as a speaker at the Plakat & Media Kongress (Poster & Media Congress) in Düsseldorf. The title of my presentation is: Innovation QR-Codes: Interaction through the poster becomes measurable. (Innovation QR Code: Interaktion am Plakat wird messbar).

To play with QR before the congress, you can now register via QR Code (see below or on this PDF). If you have a Kaywa ID you just can login and your needed address data (as long you have entered it before) will be filled in automagically.



※ Ambient Card for Plakat and Media Congress (PDF)

※ Congress Details:
Plakat & Media Kongress: 10.04.2008, 14.00 - 18.00 Uhr
Plakat & Media Grand Prix: 10.04.2008, 19.00 Uhr
Capitol Theater
Erkrather Str. 30
40233 Düsseldorf

Image: Kaywa Loyalty / Tickets.
Contact me if you are interested to know more. Demos can be shown at our office in Zurich.



Image: New York Times (see also IntoMobile and IATA goes for QR Code, Datamatrix and Aztec)



Image: MoMo Amsterdam

Screenshot from Web 2.0 Asia

According to the press release, it's the first chinese SNS adopting Japan's QR Code Technology! We think this is great news, as this will definitively help to push QR Codes in China as well. And that means we are getting ever closer to a global standard for 2D barcodes.
And why wouldn't they use Datamatrix? Datamatrix would work for ASCII URL's, but definitely not for the chinese script whereas QR Codes do - it's a japanese code after all.

More coverage of City!N:
City!N, an intelligent SNS? by Web 2.0 Asia
City!N, Intelligent SNS by 852signal

Amy Webb wrote:

Shall we consider the possibilities? A newspaper could start a point system with younger readers as part of a monthlong promotion. Once a day, the barcode would be hidden within the physical paper. Readers would scan it in and receive X# points towards his/her account. By the end of the month, readers with 25+ days of scanning would receive a free three-month subscription. You can target a younger, mobi audience and bring those circ numbers back up, too. How about a beauty magazine - at the end of your makeup section that month, offer a barcode. Monetize it by attaching a coupon to a featured beauty product sponsor.

Generating QR Codes and developing an overall strategy does require a bit of skill and creativity...but why not get ahead of the mobile phone eight ball? And why the hell not do that right now, as consumers are rushing out to buy data-enabled phones?

Amy, we have it ready for any newspaper;)