My VWD Lottery Experience.

Have you noticed the little random dots in a square on the left side of this blog?.. it’s called a data matrix barcode. I have a feeling that it might be something we see more and more of in publications and advertising… but first…how I found out about them..

Newer phones like the Nokia N95 and others have a built in bar code scanner (for N95 it’s in applications/office/barcode reader). When I first stumbled upon this application on my ritual “fiddle with a new phone before you’ve fully charged the battery for the first time” I saw it labelled as “Barcode Reader”. ACE! I thought, and I tried to find the first barcode I could and scan it in. After much minutes (ok ok, after much hours) I decided it didn’t work. No matter how I held the Coke can, it wouldn’t read it.

I gave up thinking it must have been the curvature of the can…

later that day I noticed a small square sticker on a PCI card I was changing, hmmm, “tis this one of which I seek ?” I thought, I recalled seeing an episode of Tomorrow’s World on the BBC showing something that could encode a sample of music or picture within random style dots, good enough so that a fax would be able to send it. It looked similar..

I wonder if…. I whipped out my now charged phone and started the barcode reader, less minutes passed and “pflink..” the phone said and showed me some digits and…. a web link! clickable within the phone haha! success!

I then ran the battery down scanning as many codes as I could find on my drawer of sad extension cards. There’s an art to moving your phone closer until the software recognizes the barcode. Just get it in the frame onscreen and move the phone slowly forwards towards the picture and it will pflink when you get it…

I searched and found a cool site that lets you create your own data matrix picture for your own message. You can fit quite a lot in a small square! even more if you stack the squares. That’s how I created the one on the sidebar. I then decided to print them out to see what they looked like, might be nice to make a few and place them in places where people mill about (bus stop, tube train, doctors surgery etc). Geek Graffiti that geeks could appreciate!

I think if there’s anyone out there that likes gimmicks on their phones and knows what a barcode reader is and what to look for then if they see one of these datamatrix barcodes while they are out or on the underground or reading a magazine they are bound to scan it in. I know I would! The cool thing is, you can put web addresses or phone numbers and they get recognized by the phone and are clickable or phonable once scanned!

I also put one on a flyer I have and printed it out thinking it would be a nice way for someone who sees a poster to take the web address with them on their phone without having to type it in. “scan for address” underneath it make perfect sense if you know what they are.

I was almost ready to print out a gazillion on white stickers ready to ahem, distribute! Problem is, they are awfully fiddly to scan properly and if they’re surrounded by other colours, it’s even harder to get them to scan. until….

..I found a better site! these types of datamatrix codes are of a type called QR Codes and they scan much better, the extra squares must help the phone recognize the parity bits or whatever they’re called. Try it yourself if you have a phone that can do it.
I like this barcode site because the page updates the barcode while you type but you have to do a screen capture to save the image (press alt+prt scr to take a snapshot of the active window and put it on the clipboard ready to ctrl+v paste it into MS Paint or photoshop).

I’m going to print a few hundred of these suckers and start leaving them stuck in places, I wonder how many clicks it will get??

I think when more people get this kind of technology on their phones, this will start to appear in magazines and adverts so people can scan in a web address or phone number ready to use later.. .either that or it will die a death and be replaced by some other less fiddley way of transmitting data from hard copy