Recently I met Alexis Rondeau, one of the two clever fellows that created the site Semapedia.org. The site allows you to create 2D barcodes, called Semapedia Tags, that link to information on Wikipedia. The idea is that you print a tag that links to information about a place or thing, then you stick that tag on the place or thing. Anyone with a 2D scanner program on their phone can then lookup the information at the site when they see the tag. Pretty cool! (I’m still trying to get the program for my Treo installed correctly.)
Anyway, I saw this on their blog and I had to share:
so you are on a bus stop and there is a barcode to download the bus schedule. Great Idea, not. The poster with the barcode takes a whole side of the bus stop, why not just print the time table, how often does that change? Why pay for anything like that. If the service behind the barcode would tell you exactly in realtime where the bus currently is located or tell you if any of your friends are on that bus, then we have something a printed time table cannot provide and is clearly more attractive. Haven’t seen any of the other ideas, but for starters, detect needs, find out what current medias don’t provide and so on.
Indeed! Always go for the simplest solution.