Every time you look through a magazine, look at advertising boards and even on TV and Cinema, you are beginning to see these little black and white maze like symbols!  These my friends are called QR Codes and they are the going ballistic.

What are they?

QR codes, or quick response codes, is a type of 2D bar code that may be decoded using your smartphone with a QR code reader. From being a tracking mechanism for auto parts, QR codes have proven to be very useful in marketing and convenience related applications that are more suitable for smartphone users. In the recent months, we have seen QR codes show up on marketing materials such as movie posters, promotional posters for various products, billboards, flyers, among other things. These have also been seen on newspaper ads, business cards, artwork, and other everyday things.

There are two main things that you have to have when you deal with QR codes:

1. A mobile phone with a camera and Internet connectivity
2. A QR code reader

Most smartphones coming out nowadays have a QR code reader already installed. For some, you would need to download the reader and install it yourself.

Note that you would have to check on the compatibility of these readers with your phones as some readers work only on iPhones or Android phones. There are readers that work on the Symbian OS found on Nokia phones and Java found on lower end smart phones.

If your Smartphone does not have readers installed then visit www.i-nigma.com and follow the instructions.  i-nigma is free to install and use.  Once you have the reader installed, you can scan away to your heart’s content.

There are numerous uses and applications for QR Codes, here are a few examples of what can be done.  You are not limited to just Web URL’s, you can instruct SMS, emails, videos, Google Maps, business cards,  just about whatever info you wish.

Ordinary people can generate a QR Code for free and get other people or customers to go to your website, blog, business social media profile, product pages, articles, media sites, your own personal Facebook or other online social networking sites, among other.

It also acts as a business card. Some people are already beginning to generate a QR Code and printing them onto their business cards too.

With QR Codes, it simply means that you now have a bridge between your offline products with online information. The separation between the two is now blurred. What’s more, with mobile phones like smart phones, you can get connected to anything that is online, no matter where you go.

4 reasons why QR codes are going to be big

1. There are currently an estimated of more than 53 million smartphone users in the United States. More around the world. Also, even mobile phones that have Java capability are now able to get a QR code reader. There is an audience for QR codes that is just waiting to be tapped!

2. It is FREE to generate and use. You can easily get your own QR code and embed these to your promotional materials, business cards, company letterheads and merchandise. What’s more, it is easier to deploy QR code strategies and measure their effectiveness than traditional marketing and Internet marketing combined.

3. You are not limited in terms of length, size and space. Traditional advertising works on limits. You pay for additional airtime, additional advertising space, additional newspaper columns. But fixing a QR code to your advertisement, you are literally limitless in the amount of information you can include in your ad.

4. More and more people are getting on the Web through their mobiles. Global mobile data traffic has steadily been increasing with the advent of wireless connectivity, high speed Internet and Internet-enabled mobile phones. According to a study conducted by Opera, mobile data traffic in August 2010 increased by 10% in over a month’s time, marking the fastest increase in the preceding six months. This upward trend has also been continuously observed since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

To generate a QR Code like this one for you or your business and to get more information please click www.qrstuff.com

So are QR Codes, the way forward?……….of course they are.  We need to embrace any type of media that gets our business or brand noticed.  Best of all, although most of the big corporations are now using QR Codes, because of the relative cost, you can too.  Try adding them to your site, business cards, vehicle etc; they are free so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.