QR (Code) Does Not Stand For . . .

. . . Quickie on Retainer. Rather, it stands for Quick Response, and these strange-looking boxes are rapidly becoming ubiquitous.  Increasingly, you see them on coupons, advertisements, products, websites, magazine articles, books, real estate For Sale signs, business cards, websites, etc.  Indeed, you will probably see these little boxes on just about everything you can imagine in the next few years.  This is already the case in Japan, and has been for some time now.

So, what do these little boxes do? What do they contain?  Why should you care?

Imagine you’re in the neighborhood We Be Groceries® store and you want to know if that spinach you’re about to buy is from an area that recently reported a salmonella outbreak.  You use your smartphone’s built-in camera to take a quick picture of the QR code on the package.  The smartphone reads the QR code and decodes it.  Almost immediately on your smartphone appears all the information you need and maybe a lot more that you don’t—where the spinach was grown, when it was picked, how it was shipped, etc.

Or, perhaps you’re shopping at the local MegaAppliance SuperMart® and you’d like a little more information on that 65-inch LED flat-panel television.  You see a QR code on the price tag.  You snap a picture of QR code, the smartphone decodes it, and the next thing you know your smartphone is logging onto the MegaAppliance SuperMart® website where you can read customer reviews before deciding your wife really doesn’t care that the Super Bowl is next Sunday.

Try this one: You’re standing in line at the movie ticket counter and your wife points out a poster for an upcoming feature film she’d love to see next Saturday.  Warily (and surreptitiously), you photograph the QR code.  Your smartphone brings up the studio website and starts playing the trailer.  Your worst fears are confirmed—combination hardcore chick flick and four-hanky tear-jerker.  “Gee, honey, I was going to take you to your favorite restaurant that night, but we can’t do both.”  Whew, that was close!  As with the spinach, another bullet dodged just in the knick of time.

Some of the information that can be encoded into these little gems include storing geo-coordinates (great for mapping your home or business location), adding bookmarks to your smartphone web browser, storing electronic business card (vCard) information, dialing a phone number, sending an eMail, opening a webpage (URL link), even generating a text message (SMS).

I downloaded today a neat little combination QR Code generator and reader called QuickMark and I’ve been playing around with it.  QuickMark is easy to use and it seems to work exceedingly well.  In addition to QR codes, QuickMark also generates and reads Quick Code and Data Matrix—two competing matrix (2D) barcode standards.  Have fun decoding the QR codes included with this article, including this special message:

Off Topic: I don’t know about you people, but here in El Paso we’re having our coldest onslaught of Winter weather in years, if not decades.  Right now we’re already down to 13° (-4.5 Celsius) and headed for a low of 8° (-13° Celsius) or lower.  Worse, we’re not expected to get above freezing until sometime FRIDAY! We have a word for that here:  BRRRrrrrr!!! Anyway, if your hometown is like El Paso, you should probably download a really good book and just stay home.  Look over to the top right page here for a suggestion.  (You just had to know that was coming)