Yesterday I was in Düsseldorf having my presentation at Plakat und Media Kongress.
I posted my presentation in german over at my personal blog.
※ Thanks to Ulrike and Stephan for the invitation. I also met Heike for the first time face to face.

And then I saw suddenly all the posters with QR Codes in Düsseldorf. Not only the ones from the Plakat und Media Kongress, but also the ones for the exhibition Radical Advertising.

From the german press release:

Haben Sie sich auch schon über die wirklich seltsamen Plakate auf der Kö und in der Altstadt gewundert? ? Ein Schaf mit einem verwirrenden schwarz-weissen Gekleckse am Hals??
Zur Pressemeldung (.doc)

The QR Code below points to the mobile site where you can win mobile phones, a trip to Berlin , exhibition catalogues and download ringtones.



See also:
The german press release from Nokia about QR Codes
Radical Advertising: Interactive Media: QR Codes

iPhone Cacheability

Via Niall

Storytelling with Google Maps.
Now bring it to the real world. (> Dokodare)

Via Digital Who?

QR Bots by Cross | Borders

Payforit.
Mobile Payments up to £10 right now. How much does go to the operator?

See also:
PDF copy of the Scheme Rules by clicking here (107kb). (Local Copy)

Image: Taitostation

Having read about our QR Code Space Invader scarf, you might be interested to know that Taito celebrates the 30th anniversary of the game this year.

Special Yahoo Site
See how they partnered with Yahoo here: Yahoo! under space invader attack.

※ Don't miss the QR Code on the Yahoo! Site

Via ImprintTalk

Works well on my Nokia. See the special site with the QR Code here.

***

Found it via Semapedia Blog. Semapedia has also a rant about 2D Barcodes. Go and read it;)

PS: Our own upcoming Dokodare project resembles the SF Citysearch project in some aspects, and the Semapedia guys pointed at a big problem with proprietary approaches:

Tourist from other countries will not be able to use those barcodes when they are proprietary.

With the open standard QR Code+URL/Shortcode URL approach, you do not have this problem. And that's so exciting about it: Using SMS for mobile marketing is/was only doable inside country borders whereas with QR Codes and the Mobile Internet, you can suddenly address the whole world. This is well worth to fight for;)

Photo: Bernhard Witz

Hannu Kauppinen, Chief Research Strategist from Nokia Research, at "Internet of Things 2008" in Zurich. To the podcast of the keynote.

VoiceQR will probably have a limited interest (especially in Japan with pervasive 3G), as it is much easier to directly link to a larger sound file available on the internet trough an URL.

However it shows well where we are headed. Mobile phone cameras become ever more sophisticated and if sound files can directly be integrated in the code, this also shows how small QR Codes have become in Japan.

We are still some years behind the japanese phone sophistication (some progress have been made with the N95 and the iPhone), but it's good to know that the future is already here.
It also shows that short code (small amount of numbers) approaches* will obviously soon be a thing of the past.



Image: VoiceQR - saying "Konnichi wa" (Hello)


* All proprietory codes use short codes (numbers or a mix of numbers and letters), whereas with the standards (QR Codes, Datamatrix) you can choose. Right now we use short codes only when space is an issue and we recommend to use URL's respectively Short Code URL's.