We've been spending a lot of time in Japan lately. The people are nice, the food is great, but what really gets us excited are the PHONES! Every phone has a camera and most of them are high quality. Camera phones have been in Japan longer than anywhere else and their pervasiveness has created a culture of capture. Recently at a conference, we saw a speaker give a demo of a mobile service. To get the audience to try it, he displayed a barcode on the screen and asked people to capture it. In many Japanese phones, a QR code reader is available that will turn these barcodes into web addresses. Amazingly, a lot of people did it.
So rather than type 12 characters on their phones, many people chose to use their cameras to snap the photo and get the URL automatically. It's nice to see what happens will great camera phones reach mass market adoption levels and introduce new behaviors. Needless to say, the scanR team loves Japan.
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