Something I’ve been really intrigued by in the last couple of years: barcodes. Not the kind of barcodes that you find on your food and product packaging from the supermarket. This is a new kind of barcode that you can (theoretically) use to encode with your website links and stick all over the “flesh world” for people to decode with their cell phones.
How They Work
Here’s an article by New York Times with a great pic of the future. Basically, you are supposed to be able to take a picture of a barcode, like the NYT code shown here, and your cell phone will decipher it for you.
The information included on the code can include a website address or any other kind of information the code creator would like to include – as long as it is short and sweet.
Imagine the possibilities for bloggers!
You could run a contest on your blog and set up a barcode to promote the contest in your city. Or mail barcode stickers to friends and family across the country to put up in high traffic areas.
People snap a pic of your code, their phones decrypt the code, and people open up your blog to a page with further instructions. It is so esoteric and futuristic, you could easily bring them into a world of intrigue by telling them a story that you make them an integral a part of. Give them more clues and get them hooked on your blog as the story gets deeper, inevitably leading to a prize or some other form of “gotta have it” information that will make “players” keep up with the game.
These games are called “ARGs” (Alternate Reality Games)
Problems with Barcode Tech
US phones aren’t ready yet, and even college kids (the most advanced of our species in gadgetry and future tech) haven’t gotten hot and bothered by barcodes yet.
But I believe the technology is coming and that these things will take off. My contest would have been enhanced by it.
Here’s How I Would Run My Future Tech Blog Contest
1. Call up my full-service barcode and game design company. (This doesn’t exist for regular people yet. Only dudes like Trent Reznor and big companies can afford a game design company right now.)
Tell my account manager what I want to do with the contest and have them design a neat web scavenger hunt around a list of sites I have tapped in my niche to participate.
I want my barcode on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and coffee mugs. I’d give these trinkets away on my site so that readers would spread the code around the globe in style.
2. Once my contest is designed, plan for the usual online promotion and buzz building. But I’d also line up a campaign with “Flesh Code, Inc.” (I just made that up, care to start a future firm?), a firm that specializes in mobilizing armies of “barcode sticker placement specialists” in every major city around the globe. (Translation: people who put up my barcode sticker all over the world)
Target publications where Flesh Code, Inc. will place my barcode for cheap.
3. Launch the game and watch the stats. My barcode doesn’t link directly to my game page. It includes a tracker so that people accessing my site through a barcode in Paris will set off my tracker and tell me where they are coming from. Of course you’d have a different barcode tracker for every major city to track visitors and serve up their native language and geo-specific clues to help them find their way in the game.
In fact, I’d have my game translated into major languages so that someone entering from Spain could be served the proper language as if the contest was designed for Spanish-speakers only. My game design company would take care of details like this from the start so I don’t have to think too hard about it.
Much of the game’s action (directions, updates, clues) would take place on my blog. Special software would translate it into major languages and then translate player communications into English so everyone could talk all over the world about my hardest clue without having to whip out a translator of their own.
All over the world people would be snapping pics of my special geo-aware barcode to enter a “secret world” where the game takes them to different sites, feeds them clues via text message and email, and wraps them up in my brand along the way.
What We Need To Make This Happen
1. A game design company for the regular folk. The company would put automation in place so that their software handles the intake of new clients who put all the details and goals of their barcode campaign into their database. Every effort to keep costs down would be made so that a blogger could easily afford the service and pull it off like the big boys.
2. A firm with a global network of placement specialists. People who’s sole job is to get the barcodes onto college campuses and throughout targeted metro areas all over the world. This too would have to be automated as much as possible and there would have to be enough people designing contests or barcode campaigns for pretty much anything so that costs are kept down. The firm would be able to send out placement specialists with 10 different barcodes from 10 different campaigns at a time.
The firm would have to have ties with media placement agencies to get codes into magazines and newspapers around the globe for extremely competitive rates. They’d also be hooked in with T-shirt designers so your code can be placed on the latest “I love Spock” t-shirts as a sponsor.
3. Mass adoption of the barcode system. One or both of the future firms above would have to run marketing campaigns to make people aware of these strange symbols they see popping up all over the world and how to use them.
4. Free software that works on all internet-enabled cell phones needs to be adopted as the universal reader. Like Adobe Acrobat for PDF documents, everyone has the same reader that is easy to install and use – or the whole thing will be a wash.
Questions – Please Share!
- What other uses can you think of for this future buzz technology?
- How could this be made into something that anyone can use, regardless of their advertising budget?
- Are there interesting articles or sites you’ve found that are helping to move this technology along?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
See the problem with this technology is that, sometimes it’s a little awkward and clumsy to take a photo of a barcode. Combined with having to always access the internet to see what the barcode reveals makes for an unrealistic technology in the real world. These barcodes would be a killer app if the phone scanned them at the press of a unique button, then instantly brought up information in a standard format which gave information the publisher sets.