“2D barcodes are a dream for advertising agencies, mobile operators, handset manufacturers, and technology companies,” said futurist Matthias Horx. The codes can add information to newspaper and magazine articles. News of the World was already printing them in its sports pages to link readers to websites carrying highlights.
The technology was particularly popular in Japan and South Korea, where many bus-stop advertisements carried codes. Horx also identified digital ticketing as an application: an event operator can send an individual barcode image to a phone, which the user presents to a scanner at entry. Spanish company Codilink was reportedly selling 20,000 2D barcode tickets for cinemas each week.
European deployment still faced fragmentation because handset manufacturers used different implementations. Software working on one manufacturer’s phone might fail on another. Industry observers called for a mass-market standard and pointed to the Blu-ray and HD DVD format competition as an example of how incompatibility can slow adoption.
While Telefónica was running a European beta test, standardisation work was already under way in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. ScanBuy had signed a software-standard agreement with Nokia, Neomedia was promoting a barcode system compatible with multiple phones, and China was introducing a 2D barcode standard for Nokia S60 and S40 models.
Horx described point-and-click recognition as a connection between electronic and physical media, built around increasing use of phones for mobile internet access.
