QR Mobile Barcodes: A Japanese Perspective

Editor’s note: The article below is part 2 of our 3-part series on QR mobile barcodes. Yesterday we took a look at Google and real world hyperlinks. Tomorrow we will look at mobile barcodes from a marketing perspective. Grab our feed to be instantly notified of the next post in the series.

In Japan, barcodes (QR codes) are being used by marketers and the media as a method for direct access to customers. They are mainly targeting mobile-savvy twenty- and thirty-somethings leading them to sales promotions for products such as snacks and beverages.

The Real Life of Japanese mobile and Internet users

Out of its 120 million population, 69.23 million Japanese people access the Internet via mobile phones. About the same number (66.01 million) access the Internet using a computer. And almost all of the mobile phones in the Japanese market now are equipped with a barcode scanner by default. More details can be found here and here (in Japanese).

Some examples of QR codes that are hand-held

Staff/Crew Recruiting Ad from McDonald’s

Promotional Site for Jagariko Snack Food

Here is my recent mobile barcode scanning history

• Downloading free ring-tones from the snack shown above
• Created a barcode for my contact info including phone number & email address by using my mobile. And then my friend could scan it from my mobile and grab all of my contact details.
• Accessing English language training services for my mobile from my mobile.
• Added the barcode to my Moo-like card!

Conclusion

The Internet and mobile phones have heavily impacted communication technology globally. Barcodes may become a smarter way to open new doors leading consumers to Internet sites in the near future as being done in Japan currently. In fact, lots of Japanese citizens who don’t even own a computer at home access Internet via mobile phone. In addition, even those who own a computer are using the Internet from mobile phone for its handiness. The same ideas can be applied in the U.S.

The current bottleneck of barcodes in my opinion, are ad-hoc content services that don’t provide further paths to stimulate consumers interest. Service providers need to come up with exciting ideas to continue to keep users attracted. Finally, it is also necessary to continuously improve the user interface on mobile phones.

This article was provided by Satoko Hibi, an engineer and co-founder at s21g.com. s21g is planning to release a service called, "typeout" this Spring, which is a private place for scrapbooking with some social functions including a Twitter-like inteface and a powerful search engine. Here is more information in English.