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Mobile Barcodes
I received an invitation to a party a few months ago, but it didn't arrive in the mail, it was sent to my mobile phone as an text message along with a barcode. The barcode served as my pass to the party, which could be scanned at the event.
Sending barcodes to mobile phones is becoming increasingly popular, particularly in the UK. It's an ideal medium for different ticketing applications and can stop illegal ticket touting and fraud. As a result, mobile barcode ticketing is gaining increasing use for concerts and events. Also, UK coach operators are adopting this technology to issue e-tickets, as passengers can receive their ticket immediately without having to wait for their printed ticket to turn up in the mail and drivers can scan the barcodes when the passengers board the coach. In the US, the ATA has reached an agreement to standardise mobile barcodes for use as airline boarding passes.
This technology doesn't use SMS to send barcode message, as SMS it purely a text-based messaging protocol. Instead, it uses Smart Messaging or EMS (both are an application-level extension to SMS) to send a mobile picture message with text and a barcode image. Using this technology, both 1D and 2D barcode images can be included in a message.
While the current use of barcodes has largely been restricted to ticketing applications, I'm keen to explore the potential of this technology in direct marketing campaigns. Imagine receiving an in-store voucher directly to your phone after registering on a website. Mobile phones appear to be a perfect medium to redeem vouchers or offers for retail, either clothing or food — they're portable and you rarely leave home without your phone. In the US, the coupon culture is huge. Shoppers walk around with 'coupon wallets' containing discount coupons they've received or cut-out. But imagine if shoppers could respond to an offer at home or in-store and receive the coupon on their mobile, to be scanned at a checkout.
On the reverse side of receiving barcodes on a mobile phone, is scanning barcodes on a phone. As nearly all mobile phones and devices have an integrated camera, it's possible to capture a barcode image on your phone (from a mail piece, magazine or even outdoor ad) and 'decode' it into something useful. This has been mainstream in Japan for several years now, where many print ads include 2D barcodes, or 'QR codes', which, when captured by a mobile, can use integrated software on the phone to decipher the barcode to a URL, enabling the consumer to get additional product information. This concept is currently under trial in Australia by Telstra.
The surprising thing is that this technology is actually very accessible. SemaFox is an open-source project, enabling you to convert URLs into 2D barcodes. To generate different barcodes for individual recipients, Xerox VIPP supports 2D barcodes, which can be created by VIPP design software such as Lytrod Designer or FreeFlow VI Designer. For reading 2D barcodes on phones, Semacode is a free Java-based mobile 2D barcode reader that converts a captured 2D barcode back into a URL, and passes it to the phone's web browser.
Now, imagine receiving a mail piece with a personalised URL encoded as a 2D barcode — your personalised website would now be even more accessable — you wouldn't even need a computer to visit your website and respond...
Posted on Monday, 28 January 2008 at 3:46 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/44