So whats new in barcodes? Now infra red barcodes..

And the other fascinating story from Monaco the IMS World Congress last week? I also met with a company called Ecrio from the USA who are taking a fresh spin on barcodes. Regular readers of our blog know we believe 2D Barcodes will be very big - I now like to say that its like trucks and automobiles.

I better explain this. The classic barcode we see in our cereal boxes and tootpaste packaging and on all magazine covers etc, is a business-to-business technology, not like trucks. And the old horse-and-buggy industry (horse-drawn carriages) did then adopt steam engines and early petrol engines to develop horseless carraiges. These were used as trucks and busses and trams and trains. As business services. But when the automobile was invented, we built dramatic new industries and changed the way humans travel. Coast-to-coast driving became possible in America, across-Europe holiday trips possible in Europe, Paris-to-Dakar rallye racing literally on two continents, etc. And while gasoline and diesel powered trucking grew to be a 100 million truck fleet sized industry, the automobile (car) industry grew much larger, with over 700 million private cars in use.

So with the classic bar code - the lines we know so well in any packaging at the supermarket today - it is like the first use of horseless carriages. Business-to-business use. But now the 2D barcode - just like the automobile/car to horseless mobility - brings the bar code experience to consumers - and DEFINITELY wil be much much larger in the impact to our lives and changing the way we access information.

And still while I'm on 2D Barcodes, some interesting updates. We've talked about this invention from South Korea. I think we've blogged already that when they launched these in Japan on the NTT DoCoMo network, in 18 months, 54% of the total phone user base had started to use the 2D barcode scanner on their phones. It is that compelling. It is like magic, you can get web addresses appearing on your phone with no typing. Who cares how small and cumbersome the phone keypad is, 2D barcodes allow the phone to be BETTER than a personal computer, in entering web addresses. Now we only use the cameraphone and point to the square that looks like a fingerprint. Oh, and just another interesting tidbit - the IATA (International Aviation Transport Association) has mandated that ALL airlines have to be 2D barcode compliant within three years. When you fly South Korean or Japanese airlines all boarding passes have these 2D barcodes already and many other airlines are now adopting them too. And in a few years they will be on every boarding pass.

Ok. But what Ecrio does, is not this 2D Barcode. They are thinking very laterally about the mobile phone and other technologies. They have developed an Infra-Red (IR) barcode???   Yes, its an IR beam that is pulsated that it contains a data stream. You can have an IR transceiver which is the size of the thumb-end of a pen. Or you can use the IR transmitter that is on many PDAs and mobile phones. But now the beauty is, that an IR beam is not "limited in size" in the same way as a square of 2D barcode space is. So we can transmit much larger volumes of data in the IR beam.

Anyway, the technology was pretty cool, and services around it can become magical. I am looking forward to seeing where Ecrio will take this technology.

Comments

[David Cushman]

Tomi, that sounds properly cool. How does it work in the world around us. For example, I can't imagine how it can work from a printed document of any kind. So is it reliant on our interaction with electronic devices (ie cash points, vending machines, ticket ordering). Could a website (pc screen?) replicate it? I guess it's an extra for use on some occasions rather than matching the potential ubiquity of 2D barcodes? Can you point us to an example being used today?

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi David

I believe they are only prototyping now and seeking early commercial applications. It does require the IR terminal which is not expensive nor large. We have them in most of our remote control units for our home TV and stero equipment and many smartphones have them etc. But yes, you'd need to embed the infrared port to things like the packaging of your goods, say the CD of your album, the DVD case of your movie, etc. It can also be embedded into say the frame of a poster and we could then access that via a compatible phone handset.

This is rather longer term technology and it may take a while for the exact form factors and business cases to emerge. But its a fascinating opportunity and I think it can "ride the coat tails" of the pending tsunami that is 2D Barcodes that will shortly become ubiquitous...

Tomi :-)

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