We're one of Google's Favorite Places

You may start to see some signs like this in local businesses' windows. Google has started a campaign, which I think is great for local businesses, that helps promote Google local and Google maps. We were selected by Google as one of the most popular destinations in Northwest Arkansas on the web - apparently local traffic looking for us and finding directions to our store. See the little blockey computer generated thingy down at the bottom right corner? This is called a 2-D bar code. There is information embedded in the 2-D bar code that can describe anything - free text, a price, package dimensions, etc. Basically you can put whatever you want in it. Google is leading the charge in the US, and is embedding the Google map location for the local business touting these signs, so that you can use IPhone apps like MobileTag that will let you take a picture with your phone, translates the 2-D bar code, and then takes you to the website. Ingenius right?

This has been around for some time, and there are several versions of 2-D bar codes. This is the QR code, which is the most popular 2-D bar code in Japan, and created by a Japanese corporation in 1994. Japanese mobile phones have been able to read QR codes for some time, and they use these codes to quickly input information into their phones. They are so popular that Japanese students have even been printing them on T-shirts embedding their links to their Facebook and Myspace pages, so that friends can snap a picture, decode the bar code, and see their Facebook page with no typing on little phone sized keyboards.

I read an article of Japanese students printing these QR codes on their T-shirts several months ago, and decided to download the MobleTag IPhone app, but have not been able to find any QR codes to scan. With Google pushing these codes, and businesses like ours talking about them and displaying the signs, I would expect these codes and phone tagging to become much more popular very soon. So, if you start to see these codes poping up, just remember that there is secret information embedded in these. Could be a website or Google map, could be a Facebook page, could be a coupon code (wink wink), or anything else somebody creative dreams up for these handy codes and the phone apps that are using them.

Oh, and thanks Google! you are one of our favorite places too!