By Malcolm Owen | No Comments
Posted: Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 12:31 am

QR Codes are a fantastic idea. Mostly. And yes, I’m talking about a technology that has been around for quite some time and it really didn’t take off outside of Japan, but go with me on this.

I know that you lot would have seen them before and dismissed them as futuristic ideas that will never work on TV shows alongside beliefs that we will have flying cars and robot housemaids, but strangely, two-dimensional barcodes that can be read by modern mobile handsets and actually have uses.

The main use is, as everyone probably already knows about, for mobile websites. Cans of Pepsi here in the UK have these codes plastered onto the side, allowing you to waste lots of your phone contract’s data allowance seeing effectively an advert for a soft drink.
Some generator sites will even allow you to use QR Codes to show a plain-text message, for example “Put that phone away and get back to work”.
The Pet Shop Boys have even decked out a music video with tons of QR Codes. Odd, but that’s what we expect.

But my current favourite use for QR Codes has to be the supplemental content for adult magazines, as seen in Japan. The great Danny Choo has, whilst going for a medical check-up, taken some photos of this phenomenon which charges the user a high rate for each photo they see. Of course the photo consists of an altered form of the magazine, usually where the subject wears less clothing, and this does seem to be quite a good monetizing effort. It also means that the magazine itself, despite being adult in nature, has the most mundane photos inside, rendering it relatively safe to look at in public. Although weird…

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