My OperaMake Your Own Barcode!
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:44:26 PM
You've seen those squarish barcodes popping up all over the place haven't you? You know, the ones with the little black squares that usually advertise websites or products in magazines, on signs, buses or business cards. These little barcodes are popping up everywhere and I like it!
These 2D barcodes, called "Quick Response Codes" were initially used for tracking vehicle parts during manufacturing but now they're used everywhere. The big focus is towards cell phone users as most of the popular smartphones have either a barcode scanner, or a built in camera that allows the user to capture the barcode and link to the content. These barcodes can be used to display text to the user, to add a vCard contact to the user's device, open a website or even compose an email or text message.
I find that this method
of advertisement is nice because it's small and techy. I'd much rather look at a 1" square barcode than a full page ad as if I'm interested, I'll scan the code and check it out later. The cool thing is you can create your own codes and there are tons of free websites with code generators. Click here to get started with one of my favorite, easy to use, fully functional generators. Note that Firefox, Google Chrome, Facebook and a wide range of other computer software have apps, plugins and extensions to generate, read and scan QR codes. Now that you've learned a bit about these codes you'll probably start to notice them everywhere.
IaN
