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‘Tis almost the sea­son to be jolly. Santa has been dusted off, the rein­deer re-stuffed and both are being shoe-horned back into ad cam­paigns to sell every­thing from leather sofas to mince pies. At this time of year, any­thing not bright red or fea­tur­ing a ridicu­lous elf has to work hard to get noticed. With retail stores tak­ing a beat­ing from online sales, com­pa­nies have to think big­ger and bet­ter to reach their audi­ence. A shop win­dow isn’t going to cut it; you’re going to have to do bet­ter than that to impress Joe Pub­lic.

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It seems only yes­ter­day that I wrote my last post on QR Codes, but just checked and it was last Novem­ber and my god has a lot hap­pened! Maybe, just maybe, they’re catch­ing on.

Despite encour­ag­ing signs in 2010, there were many who just believed that QR Codes, or mobile bar codes, were purely an interim tech­nol­ogy wait­ing for the newer, funkier tech­nolo­gies such as NFC and aug­mented real­ity to get their act together and take over. But, as is the way, this hasn’t hap­pened yet. Sure, things have pro­gressed, but they still do not yet offer com­pelling rea­sons for mobile manufacturers/networks to make the invest­ment to uni­ver­sally include them. This is due to, amongst other things, some inter­op­er­abil­ity issues between Wik­i­tude and Layar tech­nol­ogy, the debate over user inter­faces and the pros and cons of real-time ver­sus cached data.

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