QR codes: The next CueCat, or destined for U.S. success?

You may have seen them in airports or on billboards, especially in Japan or Europe: Small, box-shaped graphics with seemingly random arrangements of pixels scattered across the center. You may even have observed some people pointing their mobile phones at them. 

The boxes are 2D barcodes, or QR codes (quick response). They are a next-generation barcode  technology, pioneered by a Japanese company, Denso-Wave, in the 1990s. A QR code is a small box with a nonsensical-to-the-human-eye series of dots and marks inside. However, to a computer, it can represent up to thousands of characters of information -- far more than the standard line-based barcodes used on most retail goods here.

In Japan, QR codes are frequently put on advertisements or business cards, which can then be photographed with mobile phones and quickly present users with a website, without the user ever needing to type in a URL. The codes can be used to set up one-click purchases (like iTunes downloads by taking a picture of a barcode on an album at a store) or authenticated boarding passes for airplane flights (which you can already do with barcodes on BlackBerrys). The barcode above left would redirect users to the Industry Standard's homepage.

QR codes are very popular in Japan where many cell phones support their use, but haven't taken off in the United States. Though there are aftermarket programs, like this one for the iPhone, that enable QR code reading, they aren't really out in the wild. I have seen them, however, in industrial settings. At a hospital I was at recently, QR codes were put on every patient's ID wristbands, allowing each nurse to scan them when dispensing medicine or taking vital signs.

Will QR codes take off with consumers in the States? I doubt it. It reminds me a lot of the ill-fated CueCat barcode reader which was highly touted during the first tech bubble -- and then disappeared with nary a whimper. However, for industrial applications, QR code makes for a nice alternative to RFID tags, which have come under fire because of privacy concerns over nefarious people "sniffing" RFID tag contents out of the air.

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