Physical Hyperlinking

You are walking down a street and see a poster with the new car you are interested in, so you whip out your phone and tag (take a photo of) the hypercode (hyperlink-barcode) in the bottom right corner with the inbuilt camera. The web enabled phone queries the HCS (Hypercode Server) which takes you to the products Hypercode Hub Page and you are presented with the following options: Save to del.icio.us | Goto website | Send to Inbox | Mark for followup.

Sound far fetched. Far from it!! In fact this could become the next big wave presenting an easy way for consumers to “tag” real world items so they can organise, purchase or simply gain more information. The technology is already successfully in use in Japan and Korea and Nokia is embedding the technology into its new S60 and S40 models for the Chinese market, a market of over 500 million phones.

Here is a McDonalds chip package from japan with the code on the back (Photo thanks to Chion Wolf - flickr link)

The possibilities that such a simple but powerful bridge between the physical and digital world brings is simply mindboggling! Simply put, anything in the real world can become a entry point to a world of digital information. That is a powerful value concept!!