About the Author:
Chris Rand is a technical journalist and website publisher from Cambridge, England. His interests will become quite clear with a quick glance at this website, although as the site has been around for the best part of ten years now, there are a lot of historic artefacts too.
Here are the main things people come here for, apart from the rants...
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Cherry Hinton Blues
Occasionally Updated. Rarely Rated.
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Visiting websites without typing
I like this. How do you get web URLs from paper (or other physical media) into
people's PCs, phones, TVs or whatever, when they just won't type them in?
Enter the 2D barcode. It's easy to represent web URLs in this format. And
guess what? Every self-respecting teenager is now walking around with their
own barcode scanner (a very sophisticated one, it's true!) in the form of
their camera phone. Put the two together and you can get the public to visit
websites without them already being on the web to follow links.
If this takes off, expect to see lower-tech applications follow. For
example, I'd have thought a 2D barcode scanner could be added inexpensively
to your PC mouse, so you just wave it over a 2D barcode representing a web
URL and up it pops on your screen. Just remember me when you
make your first billion pounds.