The New York Times wrote this weekend about mobile barcodes . Nothing you don't already know about what you can do with the technology, although it gives a bit of extra weight to HP, Publicis, and Neomedia, the three companies are involved in a bit of industry consortium building with the stated aim of ensuring compatible standards. It's not something I worry about too much, as long as people stick to industry standard barcode formats. I'm not too picky about data matrix vs. QR Code -- although data matrix is better at small sizes, QR is more popular in Japan.

The particular example they give though is not a particularly good one, "qode", it only stores 18 bytes, and that's including the error correction, so that the actual capacity is less. In other words, you'll have to lease a string from Neomedia instead of just using a normal URL like you would with semacode or QR, which can both store upwards of 1000 bytes if necessary. Still, I wouldn't expect the NYT to understand the subtleties of that kind of issue.

Anyway, the US is usually a few years behind Europe in adoption of new mobile technologies, and Europe a few years behind Asia (Japan and Korea in particular). And mobile operators do have a tendency to move pretty slowly.

In other news I've been experimenting with Google AdSense to see how it works. I went with the small ads for now. I have to say, so far it's not very good at targeting ads automatically. It seems to think that "Make money at home" is an appropriate ad for this blog. Maybe I'm not using enough big business words like monetization and revenue generation and business model and ... whatever ... I think mostly those words are more complex than necessary since it all comes down to "making money" ... but there you are, the price that we pay for being picky.