Have you seen QR??

When Thought Pie first came together (what a day), Mobile Pie talked a lot about these things called QR Codes and Thought Den thought that we were a bit obsessed with them. It was true that we desperately wanted to use them, but we heeded the warning of Film Producer Lord Puttnam, who said "Kill your darlings first", by which he meant, if there's something that you are really keen on doing, or are really proud of having made, drop it, because you probably want it in the project for the wrong reasons. We took his advice (though he clearly ignored it himself when using the squirty cream guns in Bugsy Malone).

However today the light switched on for Dan when I showed him how to send a text message via QR, and now it's wormed its way back into the plan. For those that don't know what I'm talking about (which happens alarmingly often), QR stands for Quick Response, and a QR Code is a 'Physical World Hyperlink' - a barcode with 2 dimensions of information designed to be captured on a phone's camera. It looks like this:

They can be used to encode text, phone numbers, URLs, and SMS messages! The only barrier is that you have to download a QR Reader onto your phone. We have found that the best one can be found here (it's free).

If you want to try it out, get the reader and snap the image above and it should create an SMS automatically that is preloaded with my phone number and a message! So come on try it out!!! It's said that 90% of all WAP usage in Japan is made via a QR code, which is staggering, so one thing that we want to achieve as part of Happy Packages is promote the use of QR to the general public in Bristol. We will be using it in at least one of our mini-projects. So stay alert!