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Hearts, Minds, Wallets, Address Book Entries
Some industries are more cut-throat than others. To my mind the male and female escort service industries in Kabukichou, Tokyo must be somewhere at the top of the competition list. Slap down a couple of hundred Euro and their silky smooth conversation skills plus whatever else you can negotiate will presumably be yours for the night. Given the money floating around and the intense competition for that money it makes sense that they'll do what they can to have a presence in the minds, wallets and mobile phone address books of prospective clients.
So it is unsurprising to find a business card shop in the heart of Kabukichou offering to print QR (2D) bar codes onto otherwise standard business cards. (The photo above shows the mockup/advert from that shop). I'm not particularly enamoured with QR bar codes, but they seem to pop up with increasing regularity here in Japan - in magazines advertising mobile phone services, on receipts, on collectables. My gripe with the design is that the barcode graphic is by and large damn ugly, and tends to dominate whatever they are printed on. However, with camera phones from all the Japanese carriers equipped with software to capture and interpret the information from the bar codes they are one fairly ubiquitous way to provide short cuts to information. Don't want to type in that URL? Switch on the camera, point and click and its transferred to your phone. Don't want to enter the details of a contact? Names, URLs, email addresses, phone numbers, mail addresses can all be embedded and saved to the phone.
I'm given a lot of business cards and have only ever come across the use of QR bar codes printed on the business cards twice - both times from people working in the mobile phone industry. For most people the effort involved with generating a personal bar code and having it upset the balance of the card design are two barriers too many compared to the potential benefit to the person whom receives the card.
The task of exchanging contact information typically involves effort from both the giver and receiver of the information. With QR barcode reading software already installed on the receiver's camera phone a suitably motivated giver of the information can take over some of the task-burden from the receiver. On business cards its seems this currently equates to escorts, and mobile phone geeks.
Writing from Kabukichou | September 20, 2005 | Permalink
Comments
I agree that the QR codes are ugly, but they are potentially very useful. Shipping and retail have enormous potential, but business cards are probably not their best application. I suspect that for the escorts and especially phone geeks, the practical value of having the code might be less than its value as a signifier. Remember 'geek code' sig files? You didn't have to waste time actually translating one to understand the bulk of its meaning regarding the owner.
I wonder to what extent the QR codes are a stopgap for RFID, and to what extent they may persist. You'd think that a primary objective of technological advancement would be to beautify the visual environment, but history shows that is rarely the case...maybe if the codes came in pastel hues rather than B&W? :)
Posted by: Andrew at September 20, 2005 9:28 PM