Friday, July 10, 2009

Why Dynamic QR codes are a game changer for Print: The high margin deliverable is the spreadsheet.

QR codes are nice. Invented in 1994, they are already sweeping through Japan and the rest of SouthEast Asia. The wave is now moving through Australia, the UK and Europe. As the titans of telecom and the internet compete, it is set to move quickly through the States.

The first QR codes took one from Print to the Cloud. But it was pretty much a one way street and therefore a dumb connection. Dynamic QR is a two way street. It becomes an information exchange. The user gets access. The user gives information about themselves. The depth of the information is limited by the users online open identity or previously given information.

That makes it possible to gather data at the granular level about motion through space. Granular level data points capturing motion through space and exchanges in time are hard data. That's why demography + genetics is how the social sciences get on the pathway to a hard science. See The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.

Print and Smart Phones are the mobile media
Embedded GPS + Internal Compass + a camera + + + is turning the smart phone into a data point producer. While most of the buzz is from the user side, the monetizable values are either charging rent for the network and/or harvesting the data to deliver the spreadsheets (analytics) needed for evidence based decisions.

The dynamic QR code brings Print back into the game. In a one way communication world, Print in the form of a newspaper, a poster or a book was the most mobile information platform. The internet made the previously impossible, common place. Words, music and pcitures could move with real time speed at global scales. From an enterprise point of view was the new possibility of real time data harvesting. That could be transformed into actionable information.

In this environment Print retreated to it's place as a token of communities of interest, signage and posters in physical space and still the best medium for logical thought. But those are low volume business compared to moving and storing the world's information.

But now that all the pieces are starting to fall into place, Print is ready to re-emerge stronger than ever. The potential of Printernet Publishing gives Print previously impossible speed and scale. Dynamic QR codes create the rich pipes for real time granular data points.

The next frontier will be to assemble all those data points into actionable information. But that business is still being invented.

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