I’m really mad at what I’ve just been reading on neteco - The AFMM (the mobile marketing association in France) has launched the 2D barcode in France for third parties based on Abaxia’s solution. As usual I’m really disappointed to see that those guys can’t let a tool live by itself and grow the market - they have to put their hands on it and try to kill it by making it so hard to use.
The full point of 2D barcodes is to have people use their mobile to access online mobile informations easily. It’s really like every object in a store has its barcode and i can click on it and get infos on that very object, like traceability of the meat I buy at Carrefour or latest single preview from this artist or whatever… That use has been developed in Japan for years! It was mass market in 2003 when I used to live there. And here the only point of that mobile ecosystem is to try and make money out of it and use a technology that probably will not work with our neighbor’s.
QR-Codes have been used in Japan for years and is OPEN. Readers are available on every platform. Creating a QR-Code is free, there are even opensource scripts to generate them and they can contain up to over a thousand of characters.
OK, the operator is not the one managing the bindings between a code and a URL - but why should the content provider have to deal with the operator - do I ask ICANN when I create a URL on my blog ?
Instead of promoting the use of mobile Internet by letting everyone play with those codes and spread them, just as always in France they will remain in the hands of a few big agencies remaining an “elite” usage.
I’m a strong believer in any helping technology that helps users jump from an environment to another, web to mobile, rl to mobile, web to sl … but trying to monetize/control those behaviors seem totally counter-productive to me.
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