One of the most interesting aspects of mobile devices is their ability to link the physical and the digital world. 2D barcoding has been extremely popular in Japan and Korea for the last few years and is starting at last to penetrate the more mobile challenged regions of the world such as the US.
In the US, the uptake on 2D barcodes and other technologies linking the analogue and the digital world has been slower- largely due to lack of agreement among the five major carriers as to which technology to adopt but even more importantly, the expensive data plans that still exist around MMS in the US and other Western countries.
One major test around 2D bar-coding and mobile discovery has been conduced at Case Western Reserve University to mixed results with a fairly negative article in the NY Times covering the experiment.
ViPR (Visual Pattern Recognition) allows the camera phone to take a photograph of an object or image - the user sends this photo to an email address after which the user receives additional information such as an invite to buy, a coupon or free gift - whatever action the marketer wants to take place.
There are various companies experimenting with ViPR technologies including MobiGlyphs.com a subsidiatry of Compex Inc. and Snap Tell which recently conduced a fun contest around the movie "Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden" and received coverage in the NYTimes for their technology.
For ViPR and 2D technologies to become more prevalent over the next years the carriers will need to more aggressively push the technologies and include them with new mobile devices - with the imminent release of the iPhone 2.0 there will be several applications released over the next month or so using these technologies which will spur adoption. While adoption has been slow to date, it's likely to pick up very rapidly over the next couple of years. One to watch !
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