CES 2011

This past week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas there was a great deal of fanfare surrounding 3D TVs, and tablets, tablets everywhere but none that you can actually buy. However, this focus on flat screen 3D and Android tablets overshadowed other innovations on display.

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My favorite little show stealer was a manufacturer of modular robotic parts (and the software to run them) named RoboBuilder. They have both consumer grade and professional product lines for their modular parts. They are seeking a wholesale partner to bring their consumer product to the US market. Their little guy is very reminiscent of Plen, the Japanese “hobby” Robot famous for skateboarding and roller-skating. While the Japanese have a deep cultural connection and are generally recognized as the world leader in robotic toys, this Korean native just became my favorite new entry into the hobbyist robot market.

Also of note, eyewear made a strong showing at this years convention, particular in award recognition. For instance, Vuzix took honors in the CES Innovation Awards for their Raptyr 3D Augmented Reality glasses. Though I don’t have any video of them to share at this time, stay tuned, Vuzix will be our headlining guest at ARNY - Augmented Reality New York, in February.

Polaroid hit it out of the ballpark. The business arrangement between Lady Gaga and Polaroid was negotiated by Hollywood talent agency, William Morris Endeavor, and Polaroid’s PR Agency, Weber Shandwick. This has proven a stroke of brilliance. The rumors of Polaroid’s death have been greatly exagerated. After the rise of digital photography took their core automatic camera business down in flames, Polaroid has made various attempts at rebirth over the past decade, twice under new ownership and management (and twice filed for bankruptcy). In its current incarnation, PLR IP Holdings has created new value for the brand by developing their own stable of halo products, while leveraging their brand equity with licensing deals to other manufactures. It is a little known fact that Polaroid first made its name in polarized sunglasses (hence the name Polaroid). Their big move back into sunglasses and designer polarized-lens eyewear for 3D TV viewing was very smart; with a legitimate historical connection to the brand. Bringing in Lady Gaga to introduce the brand to a new generation — and giving her a contributing role in their product line beyond mere spokesperson — has been positively brilliant. Polaroid commanded serious mindshare at CES, and their Polarez GL20 Camera Glasses, to be sold under the Polaroid Grey Label and unveiled at CES by Lady Gaga herself, were a show stealer. I’m enthusiastic to see where Polaroid goes from here, they’re going to be an exciting brand to watch.

I would personally like to thank Jon Pollock for giving me a private viewing of the GL20 glasses, where I made the above video, as they were not on display to the public. I would also like to thank Colleen Sarenpa who was so helpful and informative. Thank you both, you’re doing a great job reviving a legendary brand.

If you find that Lady Gaga’s video glasses need some complimentary trousers to complete your cyborg wardrobe, you can go for Cyberdyne’s HAL exoskeleton. CES saw this Japanese firm’s first exhibit here in the states. Though the torso component (not shown in the video) enables the wearer to effortlessly lift many times their own weight, the legs are principally being marketed as a mobility option for the handicapped (I cobbled together my video from the glimpses I was able to snatch when Spike TV showed up. I was actually the only person there at Cyberdyne’s booth when Spike unexpectedly arrived. A crowd formed rather instantly. I’ve tried to find Spike’s coverage of this, but it appears they never published it to their website. Perhaps it ran on their cable station).

I must concede that my poor video does not do Arial Burton’s technology justice. The glass enclosure is not needed, but I believe it is a safety issue (don’t want to blind anyone with a laser). The device uses a focused laser in such a way that it naturally terminates in a “plasma spark” in midair. This plasma spark creates the “pixel” in the air. This will be an interesting technology to keep an eye on. They’ve more than tripled the resolution in the last year, and will likely do it again next year. They also tell me that they plan to launch a full color version “soon.”

Of the various video goggles on display at CES, the Recon goggles made for snow-sports were the most practical. Giving a heads-up view of important statistics while barreling downhill, they aim to introduce models catering to other goggle and helmet wearing sports over the course of the next year. Their execution is well thought out, their build quality in solid, and they are delivering on a genuine desire in the market for a quality device to deliver location based data while moving downhill. This information may all already be present in a user’s smartphone, but that is not a form factor with practical application in the context of a downhill run.

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On Display

In the past six months both the blogsphere and the industry trade press have been stumbling over each other to write the obituary of the online display ad.

Naturally, I have an opinion.

In the most recent IAB report for 2008, based on spending, Display (collectively: rich media, digital video and banners) accounted for 31% of the online advertising market. And what was Display’s share in 2007? Again, the same 31%. This should not be interpreted that online display advertising spending has remained flat. Online marketing budgets overall grew by 10.6%. So we can extrapolate that spending on Display advertising also grew by 10.6%, merely maintaining a consistent portion of a growing pie.

So where does all the hoopla over the death of display ads come from? Most loudly from the voices of those who are competing for the same marketing dollars— search marketers and social media consultants wishing to woo those dollars over to their own budgets (Don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer. But I call ‘em like I see ‘em). So if not a reflection of trends in actual spending, what data are these dire predictions being based upon? “Click-through,” of course. Click-through performance is in decline, and therefore online display advertising is a failure.

Click Here Now!
Click-through is a very shallow metric for measuring the performance of online display advertising. It is largely measured because it is easy to measure, not because it is the best yardstick of performance. Fear not. The advertising trade press has declared the demise of click-through… in 1999. And again in 2000. And 2001. And every year up to today. And yet still, click-through remains the primary metric for judging the success of online display ads. This is mostly due to laziness. Other metrics are more difficult to measure and more complex to analyze. Click-through is easy. It is very hard to compete with easy.

Nevertheless, the consensus is that Online Display Advertising is broken. While the metric may be shallow, and the detractors may have an agenda, I won’t dispute that there is a problem that needs fixing.

DejaVu
We’ve been here before. The last time online advertising went through major upheaval, as the dot-com bubble began to burst, solutions for the declining performance of display advertising were also sought. A flurry of activity on the part of publishers, whose revenues were dropping from declining ad sales, led to the adoption of new display ad standards. In 2000 WIRED introduced the “Leaderboard” at 728x90 pixels and Cnet introduced the “MPU” (Messaging Plus Unit) at 336x280 pixels. These two unit, together with six others, comprised a list of eight standards that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) adopted in February of 2001. Early on, a competing standard to the 336x280 emmerged. As other sites began to accept the 336x280 unit, it became common practice to scale the unit down to 300x250 (exact same aspect ratio) until this slightly smaller bastard unit eventually superseded the original as the more common size (they are both now listed as AIB standards). Today the MPU, the Leaderboard and a third unit, the 160x600 pixel “Skyscraper” constitute 90% of all online display ads sold (anonymous source at Havas). When adopted in 2001 the initial download size for an MPU was 40k. Today the IAB’s recommended initial download size is still 40k.

Now let’s look at some numbers.

I wouldn’t be the first to call for larger ad sizes. But this is not nearly as significant as the lesser mentioned variable— K-Size. Larger media placements are worth nothing if not allocated enough “K” to do something with them. Lack of needed k-size kills more creative concepts than a client with a hangover. And if your concept does survive the k-size crunch it gets watered down like a cheap drink. A media spec with a low k-size will destroy production quality. Yet it rarely gets mentioned in this debate. K-size can be the difference between two or three static frames or smooth flowing animations, it’s the difference between crisp photographs or smudged and rutty image compression.

The chart above only tells part of the story. It would be one thing if the broadband pipe had opened wide but publishers had kept page-load low, optimizing for faster downloads. But this is precisely not the case. A quick perusal of major media outlet home-pages show page loads between 650k-900k. By now some may point out that there are sites that offer a larger K-size spec (though not typically). They are killed by the process.

The Real World
Most amazing about this debate is that it is taking place largely at the exclusion of those who actually make online display ads. So I’d like to discuss now how this process works, how it can work, and what industry changes are needed to make it work right.

The first question one may ask is, why I choose to single out the MPU. Those who work in media buying may be aware that this unit accounts for the smallest of the three largest units mentioned above, that together account for the bulk of online media inventory. Because for the creative department, this unit is the original. By this, I mean, this is the unit that creative is concepted against. In most cases, all other units are considered “resizes.” This part of the process, presenting internally, and pitching ideas to the client, is not unlike the process used to develop creative for any other media channel. What is different is that the concepts have to be executable in 40k. True, some publishes may offer more K, but it is rarely able to be developed against. This is a result of the way online media is purchased. Let’s have a look, shall we?

For media, that plan is fine. However, in the creative and production budget, that is one line item: a 300x250 banner, to be trafficked to six media outlets. There’s a 120k unit in there, but there will never be a 120k unit trafficked. Because a publisher that only accepts 40k cannot receive a 120k ad, but a publisher that has a 120k spec will accept a 40k ad. And the client isn’t paying the production costs of making multiple versions of what they view as one ad. So the agency can either develop six different versions, degrading in quality/functionality with each drop in K-size and eat the production costs (which they won’t). Or they can just develop one unit at the lowest common denominator spec and traffic it to all the different sites. This is the industry-wide practice. This is why, regardless of the publishers’ individual specs, in nearly all cases only 40k units ever get produced.

There was a time when all of this media was managed in-house, by the advertising agencies and digital boutiques who developed the creative. But over the past decade, as online media budgets grew enough to merit attention, the major holding companies spun the online media buying departments off from their individual agencies, and each consolidated them into one of their dedicated media buying subsidiaries. I can see how this seemed like a reasonable strategy at the time. The economies of scale work great for broadcast. From a media perspective, a 30 second spot, is a 30 second spot, is a 30 second spot. As a unit of media, they can be shuffled interchangeably. This is what is attempted with the IAB standards established in 2001. But those standards were established when about 90% of the US internet audience was on dial up, mostly on 800x600 monitors (followed by 640x480!). Even when some sites offer more bandwidth, all it takes is one site in the media buy with a lousy spec to ruin a campaign. One irony of this process is that the more the client spends on media, the the greater the chances that all of the media will be dumbed down. A smaller client will have a smaller media buy, possibly limited to only a couple of outlets. If there is a buy with a large k-size, they will be more likely to be able to take advantage of it in their creative development and production.

When media buying was done in house, there was a way to handle this. When a particular publisher had a more restrictive ad spec than others in the buy, a member of the creative team could walk down the hall and ask for help from their account’s media planner, who would then set up a call with the publisher. Knowing that the agency controlled the media dollars, publisher were much more cooperative. The decision would be escalated to a director level account manager on the publisher’s side who had the authority to overrule the standard ad spec.

Today the creative agencies no longer control these media dollars. While there is pressure from media buyers (and clients) for larger ad sizes, there is little pressure for more bandwidth/k-size. The full ramifications of k-size seem to be seldom understood by media buyers or clients, who are a few steps further removed from the actual process of making the ads.

On the exceedingly rare occasion that a call can be coordinated with a publisher to discuss accommodating a creative concept that is outside of the existing media spec, the agency now lacks any leverage at all over the publisher. Hence, they will no longer defer to a more Sr. level member of their ad sales team to make the decision. Instead they defer to the Web Master, or a Sr. member of the site development team. They have a different set of motivating criteria. While account management was previously motivated by the fear of loosing a piece of business, whether implied or explicit (“We’re already developing this ad unit to a more generous media spec for another site. If your site cannot accommodate this spec, we will have to remove you from the media plan.” I’ve heard an in-agency media planner say this to a publisher. It works.). The site-dev team at the publisher does not think this way. The publisher knows the agency has no other option but to grovel and beg. If it were any other case, they would not get deferred to a dev team. The development team will blame it on testing. The stereotypical response is, “Going outside of our existing [iron-clad, carved in stone] media spec would require additional testing. I’m afraid we have to say ‘no’.” The development team does not look at such a request in the context of their company’s revenue. To them, this is a testing and QA question, and frankly viewed as an annoying diversion from their main responsibility— building the publisher’s own website. When asked, the answer is “No.” Everytime “No,” always “No”.

Some might ask, why doesn’t the agency bring in their media counterpart to advocate for them on a joint conference call between agency, media and publisher? That only works on paper. In this scenario the creative department, working through account management, sets up a call with the media firm to coordinate setting up another call with the publisher. And the client will want to be in on both the agency/media call, and the subsequent agency/media/publisher call as well. That means coordinating multiple schedules between multiple individuals at multiple companies… twice, just to get the conversation started. All the while moving against the fast paced schedule of online campaigns that generally go from brief to traffic at about 10 times shorter schedule than they do for broadcast or print. The ball just moves too fast for that much bureaucracy. Furthermore, being on the same team or not, the media firm always views this sort of thing as an encroachment upon their “turf” by the agency side.

A good argument could be made that the networks need to foster tighter relationships between the agencies and media-buyers in their network. Deeper relationships than a monthly or quarterly director-level status meeting, and involve people that actually do the work, so they’re able to be more agile. But my money is against it— against the idea that they would ever do so, and against the notion that it would be successful if they did.

This is the way the industry actually works. Yes, it is broken.

My recommended solution would be to move online media planning back into the agencies. This is, of course, easier said than done. Billions of dollars are at stake, and the media buying firms view online as a long-term, high-growth piece of their business. They would not be cooperative about such a restructuring. But if agencies or perhaps some forward thinking clients decided to experiment on their own, it’s hard to fight against success. Perhaps it could be a model to emulate.

And it just might help save the publishers from themselves.

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I have a lot more to say on this subject, including some recommendations on solving some of these problems, but this article has grown to a length that I feel is stretching the short attention spans of likely readers. So I’ll stop here, and write a follow-up, once I have some comments.

New Year Endorsements

Putting a wrap on 2008, I set a goal to get my own online efforts organized. I had websites scattered across several different hosting providers. In conjunction with the launch of my new website, this was the right time to review my existing arrangements. Having done so, I’m now making some new year endorsements.

MediaTemple for Hosting
My research on hosting providers eventually led me to MediaTemple. So far I’m very pleased with their entry level Grid-Service package that includes hosting for 100 domains, 100 GB of storage, 1 TB of bandwidth and 1000 email addresses, for $20 a month or $200 a year. Their dashboard has the slickest interface I’ve seen in the business, and they also have a sweet iPhone version to manage your websites on the go. Their customer support has been impeccable. I actually got a recording that told me, “your approximate wait time is… one minute.” The other three times I’ve called a technician has answered on the first ring without even going into a queue!

GoDaddy for Domain Registrar
Several years ago I had a similar issue consolidating my domain registrations. I went with GoDaddy, and I’ve been pleased with the decision. The interface is well organized, and has plenty of automation tools to manage my domains. Though the up-sell e-commerce efforts on their website can sometimes be overbearing, their email and phone support are top notch. Amazingly, they’ve also managed to take a service which has, for all practical purposes, become a commodity and add premium value to their offer. They don’t do this to command a higher price— they do this all-the-while remaining one of the industry’s most price competitive vendors. It is no surprise that they remain the world’s #1 registrar. Their cheesy marketing efforts not withstanding, I chose to stick with GoDaddy.

Clicky for Site Analytics
The next service providers on my list to research were site traffic analytics tools. I was using a very dated stats service I’d been with since the 90s. I knew there were better products on the market, but stayed with them out a familiarity. After checking out many products in a very competitive market, I narrowed it down to two choices— Clicky and Mint. Clicky’s filtering tools and iPhone integration were persuasive, but its built in ability to track Flash events and file downloads was the deciding factor. It also doesn’t hurt their case that their interface is smart and slick and easy to get to the information I need quickly.

Squarespace for Blog Platform
There was no debating my choice to stick with Squarespace for my blog platform. I cannot evangelize their their product enough. My site here is but a tiny glimpse of the platform’s capabilities. If you haven’t yet had a look, take a peak at their homepage video demo. To call Squarespace a blog platform is almost an insult. It is a very robust content management platform with the best user interface and customization tools on the market anywhere at any price.

Viddler for Online Video
Earlier this year I switched to Viddler for all my video content needs. It produces better quality video, and less bug-prone uploading than YouTube, and the uploads are exponentially faster. There are also tools for book-marking the timeline, and other value added features, as well as a slicker interface and more professional looking video controller than YouTube. It also gives users the opportunity to monetize their video content with a commission on ad sales run with their video, and several parameters of control over what ads will be run with their content.

Tramsmit for FTP & AASync to Archive
These last two products I’m going to endorse are not web services, but I don’t want to neglect mentioning a couple of the support applications that I depend on to get work done. A hosting provider is useless without file transfer capabilities. For this I use Transmit. It was not a recent decision, I made the move a couple of years ago, but I did audit my options as part of my overhaul. Much like my recent step up the ladder with my stats platform, I had been using a legacy FTP app out of mere familiarity, and finally got around to upgrading to a top flight product. More recently I began using a very minimal backup application called AAsync to archive my files, including my websites, to an external drive. It isn’t a solution that I would expect to scale, but for a small operation like myself, it is very efficient for my needs. It has an intuitive interface that is super easy to use— I tell it what I want to back up (down to the level of individual folders), from which drive, to which drive. I set it on a timer, and don’t have to think about it again. If I’m not here and the computer is off, it will start up the computer itself, and run its backup routines completed automated.

So that wraps up my web service endorsements for the new year. I’ve never felt like I had my online efforts so buttoned up as I do today. Pretty much across the board, competition has driven improvements in quality. If you have not recently audited the offerings of your current providers against the competition, the new year could be the time to do so.

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SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION™
At that, I will segue back into the launch of my new website, the original impetus for this overhaul. There are still several more projects I need to load into the portfolio, and like every site, it will always be a work in progress. My next step is promoting the site, which I can start by inviting you to have a visit at: ChrisGrayson.com.

Applications used in the making of the new website include: PhotoShop, Illustrator, Flash, Swift 3D and BB Edit; as well as Pages, InDesign and Word for the downloadable PDFs and DOC file.

I owe a special thanks to my friends on Facebook who helped me bug test the new site. I’m on a Mac, and don’t have access to a PC in my home office. So I did a little experiment— I called on my Facebook friends to assist me in cross-browser/cross-platform bug testing, and a dozen or so jumped right in to lend a hand. A few glitches, that could have been embarrassing oversights, were found and addressed. Chalk another one up for crowd-sourcing.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

jing

Yesterday I attended a small opening titled Asian Delights!! by a Singaporean photographer who only goes by the name Jing, in the lobby at DraftFCB (where I consult for the Hewlett-Packard account).

The opening showcased two recent photo series !!!FOOD PORN & SINGAPORE IDOLS!!!. With gratuitous use of exclamation points. The first, Food Porn, is a series of close-up shots of food, especially wet food, meats and vegetables in heavy sauces, reproduced as large format prints. While predominantly asian cuisine, the obligatory McDonald’s hamburger is present as well. The second series, Singapore Idols, showcased a mix of “stars” from the everyday culture that is contemporary Singapore- cyclist teams, construction workers, armed forces, fashion models and dance troupes, a broad swath of present day Singaporeans are represented, mostly in the form of large staged group portraits.

In spite of the stale crackers, cheap wine, 70s disco music and florescent lighting, the show still carried it’s own. The work is fresh and entertaining.

Though photographed through a lens that is more kitsch than propaganda, the photographs, especially from the second series, aspire to the lofty role of Singaporean cultural ministery, documenting a freeze frame of actors in the drama that is modern Singapore. Indeed, Jing’s photography was recently featured in a limited edition book printed for a 2006 IMF meeting in Singapore.

Jing’s work can also be viewed as part of a group show at The Exchange (640 West 28th St., 9th floor) titled Tiger Translate. A show of “emerging Asian artist and designers.” The opening will be this Saturday, March 31st. You can view the invite here.

Free Peter & Sean

On Wednesday night, police in Boston arrested two artist/Massachusetts College of Art students Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, and charged them with “placing a hoax device that resulted in panic”, a recently enacted Boston anti-terrorism law.

How did this happen?

Turner Broadcasting’s subsidiary, Cartoon Network hired guerrilla marketing firm, Interference Incorporated, to promote their young adult oriented evening cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Interference Incorporated is the two man shop of Sam Travis Ewen, sam@interferenceinc.com and Michael Glickman, michael@interferenceinc.com of New York City, (212) 995-8553. Since news of the story broke, their website has been pulled offline.

Interference Inc. created a set of LED lit figures of one of the show’s characters, called “mooninites”. These small, battery operated signs like the one pictured above were magnetically backed as to be easily hung on most metal surfaces. Interference Inc. conceived of this campaign. Interference Inc. sold the campaign to Turner. Interference Inc. was responsible for getting the tchotchkes designed, arranging for their manufacture, hiring dozens of art school students (of which Peter and Sean are only two) in cities throughout the country to hang them, and arranging for the distribution of said items into the hands of said students in the following ten cities of Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Ore., Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.

Until today, the campaigns have been running in all 10 cities without incident for about two or three weeks. No other city besides Boston has made a complaint.

As a creative in the field of advertising myself, analyzing this campaign, it appears as though Interference Inc. actually went to great lengths to make sure the campaign didn’t break any graffiti or “post-no-bills” laws. Using magnets, it harmed no surfaces, and with its small size, it is probably not large enough to break laws barring billboards without permits. The choice of charging these sub-contracted, young local artists with a terrorist related offense over a promotion for a cartoon seems like a wild overreaction on the part of Massachusetts’ authorities. That’s just me.

To see images of the innocuous cartoon figure posted in context, go here and scroll left to right. They don’t look like dangerous devices. They look like a child’s Lite-Brite toy.

All of this is really beside the point. These guys were errand boys. They did not conceive of this campaign. They did not create these signs. They got paid by an agency in New York, Interference Inc., to go stick some magnets around Boston, who in turn were paid by Turner Broadcasting to promote a cartoon TV show. So the errand boys get charged.

Shirley Powell of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. gave a statement taking responsibility, and apologizing to the city of Boston for creating an incident. I am not aware of any statement to have come from Turner regarding the fate of Peter Berdvosky and Sean Stevens. Shirley Powell can be contacted at shirley.powell@turner.com. If you feel Turner should take responsibility for their legal defense or, at the very least, give a statement in regard to their fate, please contact someone at Turner and diplomaticly voice this request.

If you believe that these young guys should not be held criminally responsible for actions they took on the part of an employer, please speak out to the media, and the state and city government in Boston, Massachusetts.

If you wish to respectfully voice your support for Peter Berdvosky and Sean Stevens, and request that the charges against them be reconsidered, you can contact Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, mass.gov@state.ma.us, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, office@marthacoakley.com, and Mayor of Boston Thomas M. Menino, mayor@cityofboston.gov.

You can also share your opinions with these Boston media outlets:
CBS4 Boston 4
WHDH Boston 7
Boston.com
Boston Herald
90.9 NPR Boston Radio
WBZ 1030 Boston News Radio

Unbeknownst to Boston politicians, Attorney Generals, and Police Commissioners, through their actions, they have created more free publicity for this TV program than any amount of guerrilla marketing budget could expect to buy, more than Turner ever dreamed of.

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Merchandizing Opportunities

On the exploitation front, You can already buy the t-shirt on Ebay… wait, breaking news, now you can even buy an actual Mooninites LED sign. Wait, that one has been removed, but this one, this one, and this one have now been listed.

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Video of Peter & Sean as DJs, from 2005

While researching this story, some googling led me to a video file through a cached link to a webpage that had been removed. I was still able to download a video of Sean and Peter Dj-ing some music together at a Boston area DJ gathering. I have placed this video up on YouTube.

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Finally some sanity

On May 11th, charges against Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were dropped.

Mobile Phone Codes

Will our gadgets ever catch up with the Japanese? Well, not likely, but hopefully 2007 will be the year that the US gets mobile codes. In Japan, most camera-phones are already equipped with mobile code reading software. It is becoming popular in Europe as well. To read the codes, you must have the right software installed on your phone. Point your camera and it will read the code. This can contain a phone number, a link to a website, or some other piece of data, and allows the user to act on it at that moment or store it for later use.

See a poster for a concert you want to see? Target the code, and purchase a ticket right from your mobile phone, with a click. See a product on the shelf and want more detailed information or the specs and warranty? Pull out your phone and click. Want to know the nutritional ingredients in your fast food meal? Want to buy the shirt worn on that billboard?

Two competing standards in this market are QR Code (top left), and ShotCode (bottom).

Besides square vs round, the major difference in the two is that ShotCode’s technology is proprietary while QR Code is an open standard. QR Code is also more widely used internationally, and has been around longer. It was originally developed to track auto-parts, and it was approved as an international standard in June 2000. Knowing the outcome of Sony’s Betamax vs JVC’s VHS battle, my money is on QR Code.

QR Code was developed by the Japanese company, Denso-Wave. A Swedish company named Kaywa has developed a camera phone reader plaform on the QR Code standard.
Go here to download software for your camera-phone to read QR Codes.
Go here to make a custom QR Code that you can download, print, etc.

ShotCode was developed by the Swedish company, OP3.
Go here to download software for your camera-phone to read ShotCodes.
Go here to make a custom ShotCode that you can download, print, etc.
(Before making a ShotCode, you must give contact info, then they send you a password via email.)

As I’ve seen QR Codes getting coverage recently in the trade press, it reminded me of a conversation I had a couple of years ago with business acquaintances from R/GA. They were involved in some kind of test market with their Target client. As it was explained to me, the shopper would be able to use their camera phone to read a bar code on the edge of the isle’s shelf, and get additional information- reviews, specs, warranty, etc. about the product downloaded to their phone. I never heard anything else about the Target project.

Even then, it seemed like deja’vu. Back in 2001 I attended a presentation, while working on the Intel account at MVBMS/EURO. One of our media planners had a vendor in that was peddling a technology that would read barcodes from print ads. They gave us all a free CueCat barcode reader. I was very skeptical of the implementation, and asked the presenter why anyone would install software, connect a piece of hardware, drag their magazine over to their computer, then use the barcode reader, just to pull up a website. Wasn’t typing in a URL a fairly easy task? The answer they gave was that this was just a stop-gap solution in order to be first to market, and that they were developing a version of the reader that would work in camera phones– As soon as camera phones became common place (this was in 2001), then there would be no need for the barcode reader. The CueCat flopped and became a bit of a joke from the dot-com crash, but their vision may have just been ahead of its time. By 2002, DigitalConvergence, the company behind the CueCat, had gone out of business. When unpacking my boxes from my move last year, I threw away my CueCat.

Maybe 2007 will finally be the year.

Chris Grayson

“Will we capitalize on the moment by instigating our own evolutionary leap, or will we squander it and cause our own demise?”

— Chris Grayson