QR Codes

You’re familiar with barcodes, right? Those ubiquitous stripes on practically everything today. But have you heard of QR codes? I hadn’t until quite recently. They are a similar idea (a way of putting machine-readable codes onto things), but QR codes can store much more information. In Japan, it’s a popular way to exchange URLs and other information. Mobile phones in Japan can read the codes using their built in cameras.

I was reminded about this today while watching the video podcasts from Microsoft’s TechEd 2005 (put this feed into your Podcasting client to get them. If you haven’t got a Podcast client, you can see the URLs for the individual videos here).

I happened to notice that the Microsoft attendee name badges had QR codes instead of barcodes. I couldn’t help wondering if QR codes were chosen because they can be read much more easily by cameras, and don’t require the specialised readers that barcodes do.