QR is the only real open standard out there – if you want to reccomend this go right ahead thats the great thing about open standards.

cheers,
Dean

if you mean moseycode – cool.

if you mean all 2d codes…forget about it, there are numerous groups trying to work things out and it’s just not happening.

the difference is moseycode and wr are open standards…the rest are commercial and trying to enforce patents.

Cheers,
Dean Collins
http://www.Cognation.net

Thanks, Petter.

On the point of barcode standardization: If a barcode exists that is entirely free (in the sense of being unfettered by intellectual property), well designed (in an engineering sense) and versatile (meaning broadly applicable to a wide range of situations), then I wholly agree that many industries would benefit from standardization on that barcode. I personally think that QR-Code might be such a barcode but I’m not in a proper position to judge.

So why take the time to design and employ any other symbologies? Because no symbology is best suited to all purposes. For example, the Moseycode barcode was designed, among other things, to allow for faster detection and accurate spatial localization. It’s very new, and time will tell if my design is superior in these (or other) regards.

With the caveat above, I think you are right about the importance of barcode standardization. In fact, it’s plausible that the Moseycode software could in the future recognize a variety of different types of barcode for the same purposes.

Dean’s comments are also quite accurate in almost every regard. Where I perhaps diverge is in the following analysis:

“2d codes are often about providing information ‘on the spot’ in a self contained situation without needing to go ‘out elsewhere’ to gather information.”

I think that this may be true now, but will become less important over time. Always-on internet connections (through which any subsidiary information is available) will undoubtedly become ever more prevalent (Shotcode is an example of this approach). Coupled with the advance of RFID tags, where does this leave barcodes?

Barcodes do have something unique, that existing scanners take no advantage of: their visible geometry. This is one thing that sets Moseycode apart from other systems and that molds its principles of user interaction. Internet connections and RFID tags don’t give you the same opportunity to ‘augment reality’.

In response to Dean’s query about its applicability for less capable mobile devices; a still photo is all that’s needed to capture the necessary barcode information and one slow speed Internet access suffices to obtain a manifest of the barcode’s contents. At this stage (depending largely on the care barcode author has taken) multiple layers of functionality may have been added, from the most complex (say an interactive 3D product demo) down to the simplest (a web link, or even just a number); most relevant devices should be capable of supporting Moseycode barcodes.

This touches on what I have personally concluded is the most damaging area of fragmentation in the current proliferation of barcodes. It’s not the lack of a standard symbology, it’s the lack of standard semantics for what to do with the data once the barcode is read. It is this problem that I would love to see Moseycode go some way to mending. A simple and extensible registry of barcode data that anyone can use to register and update their own barcodes would be a great leap forward; different readers could operate on the same information combined with their own symbologies and proprietary extensions.

It’s very early days and it’s a distant possibility that Moseycode could morph into such a repository, but all projects have to start somewhere, and I’m encouraged by the number of people who have shown an interest.

Thanks, Tom.