I’m famous! (on the homepage of BlackBerry India)
Hat tip: Aditya Bhandari
QR Code Archives, page 3
Start here: Why does that QR Code go to justinsomnia.org?
Why does that QR Code go to justinsomnia.org?
Back in 2007 I stumbled upon something called a QR Code. It was a neat two-dimensional barcode that encodes textual information visually—with URLs being a promising application for the emerging smartphone market (thanks to the release of the iPhone that year). So I did what any self-respecting personal blogger would do: I QR-encoded my own URL. And posted it to my blog.
At some point between then and March 2011, my QR Code image got lodged in the second position of Google Images’ search results for “qr code”. As a result, my self-referential QR Code blog post became one of the most requested pages on my site, regularly clocking in several hundred views a day. But what happened next almost defies explanation.
I’m famous! (on a Brazilian futebol site)
Can you guess where?
Look closer…
Closer still…
Yup, another website has used my QR Code in a product demo (previously: I’m famous in a random MeeGo demo). Just goes to show that the fidelity of a QR code holds up pretty well even after being shrunk down to 70px wide, rotated, colored green, displayed on an LCD screen, and captured by an iPhone camera.
The website belongs to a Brazilian company called Torcedor Personalizado (Custom Fan) which is apparently selling t-shirts emblazoned with a custom QR Code to coincide with the World Cup. Here’s a line-by-line translation of the homepage graphics:
Desperte a curiosidade de todos nesta copa!
Awaken the curiosity of everyone in this cup!Convide seus amigos e faça sua camiseta de torcedor apaixonado por futebol.
Invite your friends and make your shirt from passionate fan of football.Crie uma mensagem que será personalizada com QR Code. Para ler o código basta tirar uma foto com um celular que contenha um leitor de QR Code.
Create a message that will be personalized with QR Code. To read the code simply take a picture with a cell containing a QR Code reader.Instale o leitor em seu celular, clique aqui, é grátis.
Install the reader on your mobile, click here, it’s free.Fazendo sua camiseta, você poderá fazer parte de nossa rede de torcedores
Making his shirt, you can join our network of supporters
I’m famous! (in a random MeeGo demo)
This one just boggles the mind. Apparently a QR Code (a sort of fancy 2D barcode for URLs) that I generated pointing to http://justinsomnia.org/ ended up in a YouTube demo video for MeeGo, a Linux-based mobile operating system joint-venture between Intel and Nokia.
Perhaps I have a fan out there in the MeeGo project? Much more likely, they grabbed it from Google Images after searching for “qr code,” where my image just happens to rank highly.
Of course I wouldn’t know this if it weren’t for some curious soul who saw the video on Engadget today, paused it at the 3:01 mark, and thought to use his cellphone to read the QR Code. And then probably wondered why the heck he was staring at my blog. Something tells me I should not expect a traffic spike from this.
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