Tuesday, 27 April 2010

Tesco.com HQ QR-Code: Android phones are most used decoding devices / QR codes with built-in images

Thanks for the feedback on the QR code 'experiment' I tried on my fellow staff members yesterday. Sounds like quite a few of you had fun finding ways of decoding the QR code I put up on the media screens at Tesco.com HQ.

Judging by feedback, it seems that more Android-based phones were used to decode than any other device (both from staff at HQ and other people who saw the QR code I included in the blog post). It just goes to show what inroads are being made by Google's mobile operating system, at least amongst the tech community.

Roger Smolski pointed me towards his 2D-code online magazine, where he reports on the latest news in 2-dimensional barcode design. I was particularly interested in his article on how mathematicians are making 2D-barcodes more 'friendly' by adding pictures in with the barcode display in a way that does not make decoding more challenging for scanners.

QR-codes, with their ability to store lots of data in a small space - and their attendant ability to intrigue people enough to get them to decode that data - are set to have an interesting future and one worth watching.

In the meantime the barcode will stay up on the media screens in HQ (rotated with the other slides) for today so please have a go at decoding it on your phone or device - or try it here of course.

Posted by Nick Lansley at 09:35
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1 comment:

  1. Unknown27 April 2010 at 13:08

    Great to see Tesco using QR Codes, albeit only in-house at the moment. The opportunities for using them in-store are immense... Imagine seeing product tagged with recipe information or country of origin info..

    ReplyDelete

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