QR Code Stops You From Killing Your Fingers

Have you ever tried to type a long list of URL onto your mobile phone, painfully trying to access a page that you’re truly interested in? If you have, you’ll know the pain when I say that it isn’t a lot of fun. Texting someone is already ‘taxing’ enough. Sure, phone companies like Palm, Blackberry, iPhones, etc have gone all out of their way to make accessing the internet a little easier for cell pone users but there’s only so much they can do and most of them are simply off-the-shelf simple with their keyboards and small screens. It does nothing to make life significantly easier when someone needs to access a page like this: http://news.alibaba.com/article/detail/technology/100138994-1-cellphones%253A-new-billboards.html

Try typing THAT into your mobile phone….even if you’re using a blackberry! Not only is it confusing, it’s also extremely clumsy. And THAT is the kind of barrier that we’re on the verge of eliminating with the introduction of QR codes. It’s a little like what we have on Twitter (only smarter and faster) which is what we call the Tiny URL. Check them out at www.tinyurl.com and shorten a long URL for yourself. Life is bliss when things are kept simple.

Some people in the cell phone marketing and advertising industry are already dubbing QR Code as the murderer of long URLs, looked at from a positive angle, of course. What’s surprising is that despite the number of cell phone users outside of Asia, QR Code seems to have extreme difficulties penetrating countries outside of Asia. In Asia, QR Code has literally entered the mainstream media industry.

In San Diego, however, we noted that the movie ‘9’ is attempting to push QR Code use too. During their Comic Con event, there was this QR Code displayed where cell phone users can scan it and get instant access to exclusive clips that no one else can have access to. It’s pretty much the same thing that Green Day tried to do some time back. We did not catch wind of the results, however, or the stats, which would have been interesting to see.

YourTube and Mozilla have seemingly introduced this feature into their products as well, prompted by the wide Asian usage of their website or browser. CitySearch also included a QR Code search function into the website, in San Francisco, to be precise, that allowed website users to get restaurant reviews planted into their website by users when accessing QR Code displayed on restaurant windows….or somewhere really visible.

However, with the early penetration of such activities and efforts, it’s only a matter of time that people realize the endless possibilities that QR Codes presents to us and how it can really affect how we use our ‘very smart’ phones more effectively.