I’ve read a number of articles over the last few years talking about the wondrous ways in which QR Codes are going to revolutionise our lives. Japan is usually held up as an example of this, and for good reason. It was on one of my fairly regular trips to Japan a few years back that I ended up asking one of the guys from the local office what those funny, black and white blocky things were I was seeing on pretty much everything.

Japan certainly has some cool examples. Apart from just about every ad on the train having a QR Code on it which you can scan using your phone and get directed to a website with more info about the product, It’s reached into dozens of other areas:

• The box your burger comes in when you visit McDonald’s in Japan has a QR Code on it. Scan it on your phone and you’ll be directed to a website that contains nutritional information about the thing you’re about to eat, much more detailed info than you could reasonably print on the box. The fact that you get to read this after your purchase, not before, is beside the point 🙂
• You have the option of having the boarding pass for your JAL flight sent as a QR Code to your phone. You can then display it on your phone screen and scan it to board the flight. I like this one a lot, partly because it reverses the normal “scan a code using your phone to read some data” idea, and instead has the code on your phone being scanned.

There are a bunch more, but my question is, why haven’t these taken off in a big way elsewhere? My last few phones have had QR Code scanners installed on them by default, and with every man and his dog now having an iPhone, isn’t the time ripe for this?

Now, I understand the JAL example above probably took some reasonable investment to setup, but QR codes could be used in much less ambitious ways.

For example, go to http://mobilecodes.nokia.com and you can generate a QR code containing a URL, your contact details, or really any other small amount of data you want to be able to be scanned. Do this with either your contact details, or a link to your VCard, and put the resulting image on your physical business card, and then rather than typing your contact details into their Address Book, someone can simply scan your code on their phone and have it all downloaded.

What else? Well, even without going to the lengths that JAL have, why couldn’t the itinerary I have to print out each time I travel overseas have QR codes next to each flight so I can scan them and get directed to a site giving updates on the flight departure time? Tripit, are you listening?

I saw this article the other day about Book Crossing. Add a QR code to the sticker that gets stuck to the book and updating the history for a book is as simple as scanning it and entering some details. Similar story with SendMeHome.

None of these are revolutionary, nor do they require a big investment. However, they definitely would add some value to the process.

What prompted all of this? Well, I’ve been waiting for QR Codes to “arrive” for awhile, but today I tried to download, from my PC, a new version of a piece of software I use on my phone. I had to fill out some details, then I was directed to a download page. Unfortunately, if I wanted to then download it directly to my phone, rather than download to my PC and sync it, I had to manually type a convoluted URL into my phone. C’mon guys, you write software for a bloody phone, why not just give me a QR code I can scan?