Smartphones and QR

Forget hashbangs.

With the advent of smartphones with cameras and barcode scanners come QR as advertisement. I noticed this billboard for a local (and annoying) restaurant go up last month:

That square in the middle is a QR code, if you scan it from the street with your phone, it will reveal a special (or whatever information they choose to encode in it).

This isn’t new technology, but its emergence as an advertising tool – especially as an advertising tool that many people can use – is somewhat new.

You can turn pretty much anything made of content into one of these little codes: