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Christine

I'm a geek with a love for all things tech. I'm also an online business consultant with expertise in SEO, SMM, and digital marketing strategies.

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20 Comments

  1. 1

    cmcraft.myopenid.com/

    Hi Gina,

    Excellent thoughts here. I have the QuickMark app on my iPhone but have not had sufficient use for it. There are not many QR codes around my neck of the woods (Carolinas).

    I also like the idea of printing stickers to put on conference badges and maybe even business cards (although the info is already there so that may be duplicating efforts).

    Thanks as always,

    Yours,

    Chris Craft
    http://www.christophercraft.com

  2. 2

    Jeff Martin

    One feature that the QR Reader app supplies but isn’t often noticed is the ability to share contacts. Go to the Contact, hit menu, share, choose barcode reader, and voila, a shareable contact that your friends android can now read and add to their own phone.

  3. 3

    snowstone.blogspot.com/

    I have a Windows Mobile Phone (yes I know Android is better, didn’t get to choose), I was wondering if you know any WiMo app?

  4. 4

    rayhart

    Gina, how would you compare this with Microsoft’s new Tag?

    http://www.microsoft.com/tag/

    It’s sure colorful.

  5. 5

    google.com/profiles/ch…

    PortaPayments is a cool use of QR Codes I came across recently: generate and scan QR codes to initiate a paypal payment of a specific amount to a specific person.

    http://www.androidguys.com/2010/03/04/download-portapayments/

  6. 6

    Gina Trapani

    @Chuck: Neat!

    A reader also sends me a good three-rule best practices list for QR codes:
    http://2d-code.co.uk/three-rules-of-qr-codes/

  7. 7

    blog.munhitsu.com/

    Thanks for nice overview.

    You might be interested in Google Chart API.

    It provides web app ready to use api for QR Code generation. Apart
    from it, it’s pretty simple to use as a handy QR Code generator.

    http://code.google.com/apis/chart/image_charts.html

    Playground:
    http://code.google.com/apis/chart/docs/chart_playground.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fchart.apis.google.com%2Fchart%3Fcht%3Dqr%26chs%3D150x150%26chl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fgogaart.pl%2F

  8. 8

    Jorge Hernandez

    Great tip Gina! Already added it to our Facebook Fan page. Love you on TWIG.

  9. 9

    ryaninc

    Hey Gina, just thought I’d let you know that the Barcode Scanner app itself can also share apps and bookmarks. From the scanner screen, hit Menu, then Share. And you can then chose apps, bookmarks, contacts, etc. to share. Very useful. 🙂

  10. 10

    tz

    I’ve been working on using small embedded processors at http://harleyhacking.blogspot.com – my next trick is going to be real-time QR-codes with sensor information.

    Or, you probably know about the Eye-Fi. Uploads pictures. You can embed comments, but it saves the download step just generate a JPEG of a QR Code, put it in the DCIM directory and then let the card upload it? Open Picasa and point your smartphone.

    Meanwhile, the zxing project’s QR detector has some problems in their methods, so I’m trying to improve on it.

    (I too am a fan of you on TWiG and the other shows – there is no “this week in (robotic, kit, etc.) hardware”).

  11. 11

    Kelly Atkinson

    Gina, you mentioned the Android app App Referrer – could you please include a QR code so your readers can quickly get this app from the market, or is that too meta?

  12. 12

    pablovarela

    Hi, Gina, great post about QR codes.
    In qrstuff, if you want to have a regular URL just enter it as text. Most decoders will work with that.

  13. 13

    alostpacket

    Nice article, QR codes are really taking off in a big way. I would also like to suggest my own app “Listables!” (sorry for the self-promo).

    It’s like app referrer, but with more features such as BBCode generation, selecting of which apps to share, HTML code generation, contact sharing with vCards, etc.

    Don’t get me wrong though, App Referrer looks like a really nice app, and I hadn’t seen it until today.

    @Kelly Atkinson, I dont think it will let me post the QR code but I will try below.

    market://search?q=listables

    http://alostpacket.com/listables-2/

  14. 14

    X.L

    I love the use of QR codes for locative public art. My friends at the Waag Society have done some interesting explorations in this area and Mobile Misuse has a cool example from our side of the pond.

    One day, I’ll follow through on getting San Diego kids to “tag” their neighborhoods with their likes/dislikes.

    Xavier Leonard
    http://www.designersforhumaity.org

  15. 15

    qrstuff

    Thanks for mentioning the http://www.qrstuff.com in your great article.

    I’d like to take the opportunity to point out that registered users have the choice of embedding either a shortened qrstuff.com URL in their QR code, or having the URL encoded in its native form as entered.

    I found in the early days that quite a few anonymous users were entering URL’s that were either so long that they created an overly dense code that was difficult for a lot of smartphones to read, or were entering malformed URL’s that weren’t able to be navigated by phone based browsers.

    In the interests of making it easier (and more reliable) for one-off casual users I brought in the mandatory URL shortening for anonymous users.

    Yes, it can be simply subverted by entering the URL as TEXT, but I consider there’s more advantages than disadvantages in using shortened URL’s for inexperienced users.

    My experience has shown that anyone who’s QR code deployment due diligence indicates that a shortened URL is not appropriate will have no hesitation in becoming a registered user.

    I would also point out that QR codes generated by registered users of http://www.qrstuff.com continue to be fully functional even after their account registration expires.

    Cheers
    Greg

  16. 16

    Gene Lisa

    Cool.
    I’ll have to find my CueCat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat someplace. 🙂

  17. 17

    digdog

    Hi Gina,

    I had just created a QR Code generator for iPhone, called “QR+Emoji”, and it’s on sale on AppStore now (http://itunes.com/apps/digdogsoftware).

    The best part of the app is, you can put Apple’s emoji icon on top of the QR Code, and still able to be decoded by other scanners.

    If you’re interested, I would love to give you the promote code to try.

  18. 18

    Gina Trapani

    This online decoder is also useful, for those of us playing with QR codes:
    http://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx

  19. 19

    Gina Trapani

    More QR code fun! Here’s a bookmarklet that makes a code from any web site:
    http://mattcollinge.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/qr-code-bookmarklet/

  20. 20

    ffolliet

    is it possible to actually access the meta data from codes rather than simply be directly to a site? our division is seeing these on items that i could scan and use the data for analysis if it could be captured.

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