Those are very good news, no Schadenfreude, but we are so glad that those ridiculous patent claims by the patent troll neomedia got rejected, they included reading an ID from a barcode or RFID chip from a cellphone, sending it to server, resolving it to a URL and sending the URL back to the cellphone, a pretty much standard procedure in one way or another. We got so many emails in the past if we are not afraid of neomedia and their patents. We never were and now those claims are finally over. Go create something and don’t be afraid of getting a letter from a neomedia lawyer.

http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com/2008/07/us-patent-office-rejects-all-ninety.html

We finally had the chance (there was too much EURO 2008 soccer;)) to review the Beetagg MultiReader (QR Code, Data Matrix & Beetagg), works very fast, is easy to use and finally finally a Reader that supports some of the Blackberry Devices and the more aged but still popular Palm Treo 650 & 680. We added them to our list of QR code readers that you find on our homepage or you can integrate into your site as an iFrame.

Thumbs up to BeeTagg!

Good news, one more great working QR Code Reader for the iPhone from Beetag, works very very well, but no constant scanning yet, you still need to tap the screen. The Reader also supports Datamatrix and their own 2d barcode.

Installation instructions …

Can’t believe that I only discovered that today, 10 days after the post!

Looks very very promising.

Flashcode is an indirect proprietary data matrix code used by SFR, Orange and Bouygues Telecom in France. An indirect code means that it doesn’t encode an URL but an Identifier which then needs to be resolved to a URL at a server of theirs, proprietary because they control the numberspace. Datamatrix are perfectly capable of encoding URLs, so the reason for Flashcode’s indirect approach is that they can sell those codes to their customers, you can’t sell datamatrix with an URLs encoded because there are lots of libraries and sites that let you do that for free. Flashcode seems to have setup of agencies authorized to sell 2D barcodes. URLs are the standard to address web resources and not numbers, without the URLs those numbers would be nothing. So just use URLs.

The business model is for customers to buy barcodes in advance to be able to use them. So if you have a site with 10 mobile entry points, you buy 10 codes. What if you have a fresh new site, that is totally dynamic and every URL is mobile enabled? Do you need to buy all the codes in advance? (That is assuming that each page has a barcode on a regular browser so you can take the content with you on your mobile phone). Also is there a webservice/API to create barcodes on the fly? You need that for dynamically growing sites. Point is, with direct barcodes, barcodes that have a URL encoded you don’t need any of that. Just tell your open source generator which URL you want to have encoded and ready you are. This kind of approach will create a much more flourishing environment (and endusers paying for mobile web) than the closed system of Flashcode.

As always you could argue that barcodes with just numbers can be smaller and take less space then barcodes with URLs encoded, yes, point taken, but you can also use short urls and have them work universally.

Here is what really annoys me, when you use the flashcode reader to scan a data matrix with a URL encoded they tell you it is a not acceptable code. Why is that? Why do you prohibit a firmly established use of data matrix codes? What message are you giving you out? Even with a server side solution just take the URL and process it, return it as is to the server, a very trivial change in your setup. Please at least make that happen, at the very least. On the flipside if you scan the barcode with the barcode reader that ships with Nokia N95 or Quickmark you just get a number you can’t do anything with.

Besides that why go for datamatrix and not support QR code, which establishes itself as 2D barcode standard everywhere?

Upcode “Ignite you Imagination” is doing exactly the same with datamatrix, but as far as I know they haven’t been deployed yet on such a large scale . So when you use a barcode of theirs that represents http://m.youtube.com and read it with flashcode you get a number you can’t use, same vice versa, best case scenario is that you get a random website when a number used by the other service as well. When you embedd the URL directly all these problems go away, the barcode is the URL.

Don’t get me wrong, we love barcodes, just don’t clip their wings!

Titled ‘Knowledge 2.0′, Andreas Halbert of Financial Times Germany wrote a very nice post on Semapedia this Friday.

He starts out describing the service step by step, encourages the reader to go and start tagging (with proper permission of course) and also makes notes on possible improvements (such as that our explanation are a bit too complicated). His explanation and observations are accurate and well-received.

If you are literate in German, enjoy the read - Or, even better, go out and use Semapedia in your community.

Everyone,

with great pleasure we want to announce the official lauch of the Arab version of Semapedia today! It is exciting for us to welcome new friends from Arab-speaking countries to join our quest to bring the right information to the places where it matters.

Without the incredible on-going help, patience and in-depth reviews by Ramez M. Quneibi and Ihab Khalid Abu Hilal of TAGorg in Jordan this would never have been possible. On our and our communities’ behalf, we want to thank you, Ramez, Ihab and your team for your help making this happen.

“Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization (TAGorg) (http://www.tagorg.com) is an international holding company that employs over 2000 professionals and operates out of 63 offices. Involved in Certified Public Accountants, IP, Intellectual Property, Management, Financial and Industrial Consultants, IT, Information Technology, Audit, Registrations.”

With this version of Semapedia it is possible to create Semapedia Tags for the Arab Wikipedia and we encourage you to bring this amazing source of knowledge into the real world, where it helps and supports the people around you - Yet, please always make sure though that you have the permission to do so. If you use Semapedia Tags in your community, please let us know and - if possible - send us photos. We would love to see what ideas you come up with.

On a technical note: As a future improvement, we might switch to encoding shorter URLs into these Tags so that the scannability of the codes does not suffer with longer article-titles. Right now, the URLs are fairly long due to the necessary URL-encoding. Please note, that whatever method we come up with for this, existing Tags will always be backwards compatible and working.

Again, welcome everyone to this new addition to Semapedia! We are looking forward to your ideas and feedback.

Hyperlink Your World!

Just a very short post: Everybody was sending around the New York Times article about scanbuy yesterday. “Bar Code Sales Tool Is Failing Campus Test”, a little far fetched I would say, two quick points:

a.) so you are on a bus stop and there is a barcode to download the bus schedule. Great Idea, not. The poster with the barcode takes a whole side of the bus stop, why not just print the time table, how often does that change? Why pay for anything like that. If the service behind the barcode would tell you exactly in realtime where the bus currently is located or tell you if any of your friends are on that bus, then we have something a printed time table cannot provide and is clearly more attractive. Haven’t seen any of the other ideas, but for starters, detect needs, find out what current medias don’t provide and so on.

b.) cost, everybody is talking about costs, costs associated with mobile access can be a confusing issue agreed and I would thought that there are special deals for the students in place, it is after all just a case study and not a real world deployment.

Here the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/business/media/08adcol.html

There were a bunch of other urls regarding that issue. Here a video and there is one student saying “Every student can create barcodes and create applications”. Not entirely right, with QR code you can, scanbuy wants money for that, maybe not in the Campus Test, but in the real world.

http://amediacirc.us/2008/04/08/mobile-discovery-what-is-it-really-going-to-take/

And then it gets very interesting, neomedia is shouting back, patent violation. That is an interesting aspect, not only is the technology inferior and restrictive, it is also patented by neomedia. Amazing that mapping an ID to an URL can be patented, but good for us supporters of open barcodes, hopefully. Read the comments by fellow neomedia blogger streetstylz (the drama as alexis calls it):

http://www.gomonews.com/ctia-mobile-barcodes-panel-jonathan-bulkeley-scanbuy/

And here the patent:

“A camera-enabled cell phone that is adapted to image a machine readable code such as a bar code, decode the bar code, send the bar code data over the Internet to a resolution server that will return an associated URL that will link the camera phone to content on an information server. Thus, by taking a picture of a bar code symbol, the camera phone will automatically retrieve content from the Internet that has been linked to that bar code.”

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,993,573.PN.&OS=PN/6,993,573&RS=PN/6,993,573

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/26/BU1LVQQOB.DTL

“For tourists visiting San Francisco, Antenna Audio offers free listening tours. The company, based in Sausalito, is placing dozens of bar codes around the city in places like Union Square or at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid.”

People in SF will soon find stickers on places that link to a mobilized version of citysearch and other localized information. Great!? Unfortunately not. The used barcode technology is Scanbuy’s EZcode™. Whats wrong with that? A couple of things:

Coming back to the quote above and world with a fragmented barcode readers. Tourist from other countries will not be able to use those barcodes because they are proprietary to ScanLife in the USA. There is also a NPR article on that SF initiative linked on ScanBuy’s Homepage that is using a picture of a semapedia tag in SF as example. Funny. So if the market goes fragment, then be ready to have lots of space on your articles, stickers, posters or magazine ads for all kinds of codes.

All that reminds me of the days in the US when you couldn’t even send a SMS from a phone of one provider to the other one.

Let me finish with a great QR code campaign from gucci:
http://www.gucci.com/jp/japanese/gucci-news/joy-mobile/

I was totally surprised that that code with the bag embedded worked right away. Great work!!

Disclaimer: Alexis and me are working on a commercial QR code tracking solution build on open standards that will work with any QR code reader. This is not the reason for defending open barcodes. We always supported open barcodes. It is not about barcodes it is about the content and the ease of distribution.

We welcome comments of course and a healthy discussion;)

Alexis and me as true New Yorkers are of course super happy that the New York Times Magazine mentions semapedia in an article on QR code projects. Main focus is Roger Fischers fancy scarf. We hope that will drive more awareness in the USA to the possibilities of QR code. They also mention our other project, the “Add to Friends” Gear that lets you create shirts and bags that link to your mobile facebook profile.

“A Facebook application makes it possible to create “Add to Friends” gear, which includes shirts and bags with a code that adds anybody who waves a reader over it to your friend list on the popular social-networking site.”

They predict that “Future QR Code scarves will link up to things like a music download or a special cellphone game.“. Music Downloads are already available, Alexis and me already put together tracklets, an app that lets you listen and buy songs from iTunes (iPhone exclusive). Give it a spin, just unlock your iPhone, install iMatrix (will take you less then 5 minutes altogether) and go to tracklets.

This is of course just the beginning for QR codes. And what the article didn’t say, what QR codes differentiates from other commercial barcode technologies like barcodes from scanbuy, neomedia or shotcode, everybody can create as many codes as they want and go to the content right away. There are free libraries around for all kinds of platforms, readers for all kinds of phones or sites that let you create as many qr codes as you want, for free. Go start your own QR code project.