http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/26/BU1LVQQOB.DTL

“For tourists visiting San Francisco, Antenna Audio offers free listening tours. The company, based in Sausalito, is placing dozens of bar codes around the city in places like Union Square or at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid.”

People in SF will soon find stickers on places that link to a mobilized version of citysearch and other localized information. Great!? Unfortunately not. The used barcode technology is Scanbuy’s EZcode™. Whats wrong with that? A couple of things:

Not an open standard. Scanbuy is the exclusive worldwide licensee of EZcode™ technology developed by ETH Zurich. Meaning that if you want to use them for your business or project you need to pay them money for the code creation. And for traffic on the codes. For QR codes and datamatrix exist multiple free code creators and libraries. And they link straight to your content or via a proxy.

Their main argument “Right now, if you want audio information for the Transamerica building or a review of Cafe Claude in San Francisco, that (Web address) is very long”. Nope. Just use TinyURL or provide a short URL yourself. We have been doing that since day one for semapedia. Shortened URLs can redirect to the full URL. Are HTTP redirects evil? No, they rely on the long established HTTP protocol and work everywhere. Everywhere.

EZcode™ Readers are not as widely available as QR code readers. We have a list of 296 supported devices on our homepage. Actually Scanbuy itself is supporting in QR codes in other markets, just not in the USA it seems.

To be fair, codes that just contain an ID instead of an URL can be ultimately smaller. Much smaller. Problem is that a couple of companies are trying exactly the same thing, I just saw this morning Orange Flash Codes or UpCode. All the same old hat, using an ID with either proprietary barcodes or open barcodes. You as the user need to be equipped with several readers at once and know which one to use. And keep in mind there are many more companies doing the same thing as the mentioned ones. Besides that, lots of phones have cameras these days with real good optics. So EZcode™ might have been a good solution some years ago, but not for the internet enabled phones that are entering the market right now. And get better and better.

Coming back to the quote above and world with a fragmented barcode readers. Tourist from other countries will not be able to use those barcodes because they are proprietary to ScanLife in the USA. There is also a NPR article on that SF initiative linked on ScanBuy’s Homepage that is using a picture of a semapedia tag in SF as example. Funny. So if the market goes fragment, then be ready to have lots of space on your articles, stickers, posters or magazine ads for all kinds of codes.

All that reminds me of the days in the US when you couldn’t even send a SMS from a phone of one provider to the other one.

Let me finish with a great QR code campaign from gucci:
http://www.gucci.com/jp/japanese/gucci-news/joy-mobile/

I was totally surprised that that code with the bag embedded worked right away. Great work!!

Disclaimer: Alexis and me are working on a commercial QR code tracking solution build on open standards that will work with any QR code reader. This is not the reason for defending open barcodes. We always supported open barcodes. It is not about barcodes it is about the content and the ease of distribution.

We welcome comments of course and a healthy discussion;)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.