Measuring results and looking for KPI/KSI is one of the obsessions of skilled professionals in general and specially in web related areas. Sometimes, the fact of not ti measure can be a sign of professional incompetence or simply unconsciousness. We must have a good excuse not to measure our work.
Carrying out actions with QR-Codes is not an exception and you can treat them the same way you track your web traffic because, among other things, you can use the same tools.
When we published our first post (July 6th 2007) the total results for QR on a Google search was close to 1 million results, we are now over 66M, and as we wrote in our last potst the growth is exponential.
This month Google Trends graph on QR-Codes has changed and it now reaches a relative growth of 10. Last week we were putting together a presentation and it was only 1-5 (and Google Trends doesn’t display real-time data!).
Ever since we started publishing this blog we have failed more than one prediction (if you want to have a laugh just check our 2008 forescast). However we have always said that the evolution of QR-Codes would have an exponential growth. And… IT’S HAPPENING!
The screenshot shows the volumen of searches is growing exponentially (x, x1, x2, x3…). If this behavior goes on by the end of 2011 QR-Codes will be far more popular than Lady Gaga, who BTW is going down.
Future and present are more alike. Happy 2011 QR-Evangelists and QR-Lovers!
The following QRs are direct download links to the 2D code reader i-nigma through major download platforms for mobile apps.
Last January 9th we had our first news and published some posts on Zxing (the 2D codes reader hosted at Google Code platform) and we have been following the project that it’s moving on.
Last Friday Daniel Switkin, one of the project responsibles, told us they just launched their own QR-Code generator.
At mobile browsers compatibility test website from w3c we found a page where you can test how good your mobile browser is. You can access the URL by 3 different ways:
- Typing the URL (http://dev.w3.org/2008/mobile-test/test.html (quite creepy).
- A short URL (using a URL at tinyurl.com)
- But, the most interesting one in by a QR-Code we can capture and have intant access to test our mobile browser.
At the W3C they use QR-Codes!!
It is a very complete test that checks the standards to take into consideration when displaying a website in a mobile display:
If you want to see the results and see the performance on different mobiles here you have them. “And the winner is…”
According to Denso-Wave technical specifications about QR-Codes, when printing or displaying a QR-Code there has to be a margin/“quiet zone” around it in order to locate it and decode it properly. This “quiet zone” must have a minimum of 4 modules (a module has the size the smallest square in a QR).
In order to show this feature we designed at our QR-Store Leonardo’s Series where you can see that the margin required. When we designed the first version of the T-Shirt there was no margin and the code was very hard to capture. Check it yourself:
Bonus freak: in our code there is a message from Leonardo himself that can only be decoded when captured from the reflection ina mirror.
We have seen during 2007 some projects oriented to link an ID (number) to a URL embedded into a 2D Code. Shotcode, Shortcode or Mobiletag are maybe the most relevant.
It may seem trivial, but the character limitation of QR-Codes can make the process of embedding a URL into a QR-Code an inefficient task, because the more data we embed the bigger the code will be. In other words, in many cases we will need more physical space (mm2) than the one we have available in order to fit the full web address.
After quite a few requests about “how to generate a QR-Code” and what libraries are we using we will tell you in this post and also other ways to do so.
Let’s start with the library we use to generate QRs online. You can find it here. It’s a japanese website but the very last link links to the library itself. There will probably be other libraries available on the net, based on Java or other languages,but the one we are using is the one we just mentioned.
There are also some off-line software to generare ourown QR-Codes. Here you have the links we found:
So far we just found there three (all of them in Japanese). From Google Translator you can easily translate from Japanese into English. We hope this post to be helpful and you have any question we will try to answer 
As we recently posted in our comparison table of 2D codes, the two types we think are the best options at this moment are QR-Code and Datamatrix, but what are the differences between them?
