Thursday 8 November 2007

I think I'm turning Japanese...

I'm pleased to welcome my second guest blogger, Paul Leman:

Not an entry about the pop song by the Vapors but about the photograph of the square black and white matrix to the right. It is a Datamatrix (DM) 'mobile-code', one of the two open-standard formats for 2D codes - the other is a Quick Response (QR) 'mobile-code'. I noticed this at the bottom of a roadside advert and remembered that my son had told me he had seen Japanese teenagers pointing their camera phones at these objects when he was in Japan some years ago. A quick Google search and the loan of a Nokia N95 camera phone had this rather useful technology working in minutes. The Nokia Mobiles codes page gives you the information you need. I downloaded the free i-nigma reader from here (lots of devices are supported including Windows Mobile), created a
Datamatrix code for a URL link here, pointed my phones's camera at the code on screen and the phone's browser opened the appropriate web page. The software even managed with the rather poor quality photograph taken of the above-mentioned advert (but the N95 has a good quality camera). Chris Sexton says there's a prize for the first person to send the url back as a comment to this blog entry.*

* terms and conditions apply.

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Now playing:The
Pretty Things - Don't Bring Me Down

via FoxyTunes

8 comments:

Stephen Chasey said...

http://www.nokia.co.uk/play/>n81mc+

:)

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

There's still a prize waiting for the first CiCS person to post something intelligent on this post....

Anonymous said...

my phone isn't techno enough for this so I can't play.

Anonymous said...

http://www.nokia.co.uk/play/?n81mct

That was scarily easy, educational and useful!

Unknown said...

Prize will be on it's way to Pete!

WildNorthlands said...

How come Pete gets the prize when Stephen Chasey posted the correct URL on 9th November??

Unknown said...

Because I said the prize was for the first CiCS person to give me the answer..