One thing that I noticed in Japan was the heavy usage of QR Codes on advertisements and what not. These scannable codes weren’t very common in North America but lately I’ve been seeing them used more and more (i.e., Blackberry).
The codes are a quick way to encode some text information, but mostly I see them used to encode a URL. Now that many more people in North America have data-enabled cell phones (but not necessary a good way to type, or are lazy); they can just take a picture of the code and have the page opened automatically. To the right is the QR code for http://www.orangefever.net/ (yay for Google for having an easy way to convert text into QR Code).
The idea itself is fascinating to me because, like a barcode, it is not human readable at all. It just looks like some noise, but you can fit 1000 phone numbers into one QR code!
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