Evidence of Barcode Up-take in France
As a follow up to my previous post on the usage of Mobile Barcodes in Korea and Japan there has been a recent article James Quintana Pearce on mocoNews.net describing the increased usage of Flashcodes in magazines. The usage of these barcodes is to promote the usage of the digital magazine, linking the user directly to the mobile web version of the article they are reading. This provides an “in-the-pocket” version of the content that took the customers interest. Thus allowing them to forward the URL to their friends via SMS, and further promoting the magazine.
As discussed in the article, it relies on the consumer having the barcode reading software installed on the device. The manufacturers have been slow to include this on newly produced devices, with exception to Japanese vendors (such as Sharp). But as stated before, Japanese devices have barcode reading applications as standard.
The big stumbling point that we face in Europe at the moment, is determining which standard of barcode to use, and so manufacturers can begin shipping devices with pre-built in applications that meet this standard.
I hope that I am not the only one that has heard of MC2 or the NeoReader.
There are many JAVA applications that do this already, and various standards, semacode is another http://semacode.org/ but the problem is, that they all produce/read different types of barcode meaning multiple applications and confusion for the user