High Capacity Color Barcode – Microsoft Tags

I recently learned about a technology that has been around for a couple of years; Imagine if there was a tag you could put on anything, and anyone seeing the tag could access all information there is to get about the object! You might think barcodes do the job but traditional barcodes don’t have enough information, neither is there a standard that allows everyone to figure out what the numbers refer to.

To solve the problem there are a number of new 2 dimensional barcodes in the market, some have become very popular in Japan where cell phones come with the ability to photograph a "barcode" and then being directed to a Web page that is associated with the code. The possibilities are endless!

One of the newer codes from Microsoft just become public and I decided to test it out. To my pleasure it was really easy to create a tag at http://tag.microsoft.com. You can read up more on the technology at http://www.microsoft.com/tag and some history at Wikipedia. To use the technology you can easily download a small application to your cell phone from http://gettag.mobi. Then just point your camera phone towards the image and "snap" – it identifies the image. You don’t even have to "snap" manually. Then you are immediately taken to the associated Web page.

Do I have any practical application to put it to use? Yes I do! It so happens that I have an apartment for rent. Let’s see if it works! Try it out!