The Future of Marketing - Quick Response Codes

The more I read about Quick Response Codes (QR Codes) the more I see the future of marketing: a true interaction between consumer and marketer. Users able to to scan and get more information simply by scanning a code in a magazine or a billboard. Applications available to help users integrate a new product or service into their daily lives.

QR also brings in scary thoughts of dystopian futures where advertisers and governments know your every move. The technology that can bring a cornucopia of products can also bring in 1984 type surveillance.

Still - the future benefits are evident. QR Codes are easy to create and simple to display. Their uses run from the mundane such as quickly sending users to a website (or a subsection thereof) or providing them with up to the minute promotions. But there are more interesting uses such as stores luring consumers in based upon their buying habits; or by integrating a product with an existing app to give an unintended outcome. For instance you're in the supermarket and pass a product. Your recipe creation app has interfaced with your going out app and "concludes" that you are in the mood for Indian food. A voice or text message appears: "Buy this product and that one over there. Add it a your existing foods and you will have an excellent XYZ meal for your hot date tonight."

Oh, the future is bright. Where are my shades?

IP Delivery and Cloaking: According to Google

Wow!!! I was just having a discussion about this the other day!

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

The same person who asked "why search engines don't work as well as they should" also asked about a history of the internet. I gave her my copy of Where Wizards Stay Up Late. She's an intelligent person with advanced degrees and couldn't believe that there was an "internet" before the web.

What I found striking, when I first read the book years ago, was that the development of FTP was completed in 1972 (RFC 354). That was was the birth of the internet: the means by which files are transmitted from computer to computer over differing networks. It took 20 years from that point for the internet to enter the mainstream.

If you're interested in the history of technology and science this is a wonderful book. I was fascinated by the development of the internet as a series of distributed networks. Simply put the problem was not "how do you protect the system from attact" but how does the system survive after the attack. (Remember, in the beginning, the "internet" was a DARPA project.)

Baran's idea constituted a third approach to network design. He called his a distributed network. Avoid having a central communications switch, he said, and build a network composed of many nodes, each redundantly connected to its neighbor. ...

Theoretically it might might be possible to set up a network with numerous redundant connections ... But there was a technical limitation, since all signals on the telephone network were analog signals. The telephone-switching plan prohibited more than five links to be connected in tandem, because signal quality deteriorated rapidly with the increased number of tandem links.

At the same that Baran was developing his concept of distributed networks digital technology was coming onto the scene.

Wow! The first few chapters describing the breakthroughs were astounding.