What are QRcodes and how are they useful?

Last week, i tried to explain about NAS and it's uses http://goo.gl/mzaZjV, this week i'll try to shed light on QRcodes and it's limited uses!

As soon as you saw the word QRcode in the title, the sqare shaped pixelated pattern comes to your mind that you might've seen on some magazines or newspapers or even billboards! In few ways, you can use these codes in you own office or home!

QR is short for 'Quick Response' and it was intially developed for the purpose of easy and safe identification of the industrial components by a supplier company to toyota called Denso Wave. The code consists of a dark and light (contrast) modules and stores data in a binary form (system). You can store around 3kb of data that excludes images or audio or anything except text!

Nowadays QRcodes are used in magazines, newspapers, billboards, fliers, business cards, etc. The use case scenario for these codes in our individual lives are Vcards (contact cards for phones), business cards, storing wifi passwords, etc.

There are many QRcode generator tools around the web that can genetrate QRcodes based on the data you provide. This includes numbers, email addresses, texts, location, Vcards, wifi passwords, and many more!

This data can be accessed by scanning the said codes via imaging tools such as your phone's camera. But you need a scanner app for QRcodes or barcodes & QRcodes, more on that later!

Let's focus on few examples, for this i use a tool by http://goqr.me/

1. Vcard: Vcards are contact cards that has every information of the contact. You can generate a QRcode for you contact and stick it by your work desk or print it on your business card, so when someone scans the said QRcode with their app, they'll be provided info on your contact (whether to save it, send an email, call them, text them, etc. As you can see in the image above, first, you need to select the Vcard option and fill in the details you want to store on the QRcode, then click Download. You can then take a printout of that QRcode which is in the image format!

2. Wifi Password: Here, you can generate a code based on your wifi encription type(WPA, WEP), ssid (The Display Name), and password! With it's printout, when you scan it, you'll be asked to connect to said network and when accepted you'll be logged in. This way you needn't say entire complex passwords or they needn't type them, hassle free login! The best way to do this is to stick the printout of the code to your router or modem (whaterever's your preference)

3. Business cards: The same Vcard QRcode can be provided to your selection of press or can be uploaded to a custom designing and printing online vendors (printvenue, vistaprint, etc) for your business cards, which makes it easy for your clients to quickly accesss your contact information (like, if they just need to call you or send an email without storing as a contac, they can do so).

It's uses are endless which is best left to your imagination! The basic thing to be noted is that a QRcode needs to have two contrast colors (Foreground & Background), so you can print generate QRcodes in any color combination you want, only that it has have contrast colors (Not just black & white), otherwise your scanner won't be able to read it! Qrcodes can even be in a custom design (just just sqare), it can be embedded in the shape of your company logo for example!

That said, in theory the QRcodes are very useful, but in real life not so much! The first biggest reason for this is the smartphone needs have built in code scanning capability or you need to have an app that has the capability! Whatever the case is, it's upto you to decide what you can and want to do with QRcodes that can help you in some way, few might find it useful and others may just find it exciting! NFC Technology can also be used to read data or assign actions more complex and advanced than what you can with QRcodes, more on these in some later Article! 

A Few online code generators

http://goqr.me/

http://www.qrstuff.com/

https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com/

A few android apps with code scanning capability

http://goo.gl/gPBK4 QR code reader

http://goo.gl/uJXPH Barcode Scanner

A few iphone apps for code scanning

http://goo.gl/Ngepp i-nigma

http://goo.gl/O80hY Redlaser

The iphone apps Barcode or Qrcode scanning capability is pretty limited, it can get info but can't save contacts directly or can't login to networks directly!