BBC Promotes Mobile Barcodes

Pointing your cameraphone at a barcode in Japan and being taken automatically to a website is common place, but over here in the UK we don't have an equivilent of Japan's QR code.

This could be about to change as the BBC has teamed up with HP to produce a series of barcoded walks that can be accessed via a cameraphone for it's new TV series Coast.

Coast Mobile allows the software to be downloaded to a series 60 handset by texting "COAST TRIAL" to 81010. That provides a link to http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/coast/download/index.wml. You could always just download the CodeReader.SIS directly.

The software is a limited free verison of HP's Glass from the Active Print project.

The Active Print site allows you to create barcodes to use on Glass.

Here are the ones for RobertPrice.co.uk as a QR code and a Datamatrix.

The barcodes on the BBC's version only work for their site. However, downloading Glass means all barcodes work. I suspect the BBC ones check for a BBC URL.

It's great to see the BBC promoting this sort of thing. We are lagging so far behind Japan doing things like this, it's just crazy. In the end it needs to come down to the operators licensing this, or a similar techology such as Semacode and installing it on handsets by default. The risk for the operators is that users will then go off portal and reduce their revenue. However, surely the pure usefulness of this will mean operators will recoup losses from increased data traffic.

This can only help but drive the growth of the "mobile" internet.