QR Codes

QR Codes are funky 2D barcodes. Snap one with your camera phone and you'll get information on your phone. However good your mad T9 skillz are, it's a struggle to type in long URLs, SMS exact keywords to a shortcode or to accurately transcribe a business card onto your phone. That's where QR Codes come in. No more typing - just point and click.

Even Google is getting in on the act. They're putting them on print adverts they're running.

See this on a poster on a train, snap it with your camera and you instantly have the URL on your phone.

See this on a business card, whip out your phone, the contact is saved. QR Codes are, as with many things, big in Japan. They're catching on in Europe with loads of blogs dedicated to them.

Want to generate your own? Of course you do! Visit my QR Code generator - it even works on your phone, naturally!

Geeky Postscript.... I've noticed that many of the QR generators out there (I'm looking at you, Nokia) don't encapsulate data properly. Certain characters such as : / + etc need to be turned into special characters as per RFC1738 - many QR Code generators don't do this. This means that an international phone number like "+447....." comes out as "447....." and won't work on the marjority of phones. My generator avoids this by using rawurlencode