As the number of mobile users in these countries growths in the next few years (from 65 million by the end of this year to - according to some estimates - 160 million in 2015), the mobile advertising industry will obviously continue to grow as well. While mobile Internet usage is dominated by social networking today, Lane thinks that the percentage of social networking traffic will fall over the next few years, "as users vary their browsing experience as their understanding of the mobile Internet increases."

Lane estimates that a majority of the increased spending will come from banner ads, but also from publishers who will try to monetize their growing mobile traffic. He also assumes that the arrival of more geotargeted advertising solutions will generate premium returns for publishers.

The main catalyst for mobile advertising growth in Europe in the next few years will likely be the 2012 London Olympics. While less than 3% of brands are currently active on mobile, this should change considerably over the next two years, as these advertisers gear up for the Olympics. By 2012, Europe's five largest economies will already have more than 100 million mobile users and Smaato expects that the investments of Europe's largest brands will "fuel revenue growth over the forecast period."

Bonus: As we are heading to 2012, Smaato's latest statistics show that are are still some differences between the U.S. advertising market and its European counterpart. In the U.S., for example, Windows Phone users leading the pack with regards to click-through rates, followed by Apple users, while in Europe, BlackBerry users are more likely to click on ads (also followed by iPhone users). In terms of fill rates, Europe is lagging slightly behind the U.S., though the numbers are growing in both markets.

Google introduced hyperlocal search ads for mobile devices this morning, bringing you closer to what you want, when you want it.

As we reported earlier today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt this week that mobile search is the future of Google. "Eventually, we think mobile will be the majority of the searches and the majority of the revenue," he said.

Small steps like the move to this hyperlocal search feature - and getting advertisers to provide the necessary information - are the building blocks to this future.

On Smaato's network, which handled about 16 billion ad requests last month, click-through rates for the iOS platform saw strong growth last month. The reason for this change in user behavior is not clear, but maybe the arrival of more interactive ads on the iOS platform (and the iPad in particular) tempted more users to click on ads than before.

Of course, besides the different user experiences on these platforms, user demographics also play an important role here as well. In general, the more highly educated your users are, the less likely they are to click on ads, and this is clearly represented in Smaato's CTR data for the top mobile platforms.

Bonus: A Mobile Advertising Primer

Smaato also just published a new whitepaper that provides both publishers and advertisers with a good overview of the mobile advertising ecosystem and the role that ad optimizers like Smaato play in this business.

So now, when you're looking for the nearest pizza place and you don't feel like waiting for delivery, you're just one click away from getting directions from your current location in Google Maps.

According to Dai Pham, a member of the Google Mobile Ads marketing team, a benefit of this feature for advertisers is that it's value added without costing anything more for the advertiser.

Advertising with location extensions on mobile devices is also great value because you're only charged when a user clicks to call the business or clicks to visit your website. You are not charged when users click to expand the map or gets directions. The cost of a click to call your business will be the same as the cost of a click to visit your website.

Enrolling in the programming involves a simple three-step process for advertisers, which is detailed in the blog post.

Now that a phone call or driving directions are only a click away, there's just one thing left to consider - who's going to go pick up the pizza.

According to Apple, only "independent" ad providers will be allowed to gather data. This excludes ad networks affiliated with "a developer or distributor of mobile devices," like Google's AdMob, or with "development environments other than Apple," like Adobe, which recently teamed with Greystripe to bring Flash ads to the iPhone.

Hamoui says Apple's "artificial barriers to competition" will not only hurt developers and users, but will slow mobile ad innovation. It is true that competition has spurred innovation and produced better results for consumers in the past, and that certainly would lead one to conclude that Apple's moves are in direct contrast to that belief.

However, it seems Apple is taking an AppStore approach to iAd - making it a closed system with no competitors on the company's devices. Just as it restricts what apps can and cannot be in the AppStore, Apple wants to limit which ad networks can and cannot serve ads on their phone. While the AppStore restrictions are partially meant to provide stable apps in line with Apple's positive user experience desires, the iAd restrictions seem more focused on driving away competition than producing better Ads for users.

The company's U.S. team is currently compromised of roughly 80 people. InMobi targets brand advertisers and also offers a self-serve tools for smaller advertisers. The company offers services for advertising on feature phones and on modern smartphone platforms.

When we talked to Ann Frisbie, InMobi's , VP and managing director for North America last week, she argued that so far, most players in the U.S. market treated the mobile Web as just an extension of the desktop Web. The company hopes to be able to differentiate itself from other players in the U.S., as its international experience has already taught the company where mobile advertising is heading in the near future. Abroad, Friebie said, the mobile phone was always seen more as an entertainment device, while users in the U.S. are only now starting to regard their phones in the same way (in no small part thanks to the iPhone). We should note, however, that AdMob also has a major global presence, and that it will likely profit from Google's own international expertise as well.

InMobi also hopes to differentiate itself through its analytics tools and its adROIt product, which allows advertisers to track and optimize their buys in real time.

We'll explore these and other trends with you at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, a 1-day event we're running on Friday 7 May, in Mountain View, California. That's the day after Web 2.0 Expo (2-6 May), so we hope you'll extend your trip to the West Coast to help us define the future of mobile! To be certain of getting a ticket, we invite you to register now.

Commerce

As more and more consumers use smart phones, how can businesses utilize this channel? That's one question we will analyze at the RWW Mobile Summit. Consider these statistics: nearly one quarter of the mobile web, according to a recent report from mobile search engine Taptu, is made up of shopping and services.

Taptu surveyed about 326,000 sites that are optimized for touch-screen browsing and found that the largest concentration of these sites falls into Taptu's "shopping and services" category. In total, Taptu found 83,000 mobile-enabled commerce sites, ranging from mobile shopping assistants to banks and mobile real estate sites. According to Taptu, mobile shopping and services sites make up close to 25% of all mobile-friendly sites in the company's index, followed by sites in the "photo and design" category (17.7%). Social sites rank third with 9.2%.

In a recent report, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker Meeker claimed that mobile will revolutionize e-commerce. She cited location-based services, push notifications, transparent pricing, and instant mobile delivery as four potential areas where this will occur.

Mobile advertising is also a growing segment. In November, Google acquired AdMob, a mobile display ad serving platform, for $750 million. In January Apple acquired Quattro, a relatively unknown mobile advertising network, for an estimated $275 million. Later in January, Opera bought AdMarvel. In April, Apple announced an advertising platform called iAd.

Cloud Computing

According to a recent study from Juniper Research, the market for cloud-based mobile applications will grow 88% from 2009 to 2014. The market was just over $400 million this past year, says Juniper, but by 2014 it will reach $9.5 billion. Driving this growth will be the adoption of the new web standard HTML5, increased mobile broadband coverage and the need for always-on collaborative services for the enterprise.

Explained ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez in February, "there are already a few well-known mobile cloud apps out there including Google's Gmail and Google Voice for iPhone. When launched via iPhone homescreen shortcuts, these apps perform just like any other app on the iPhone, but all of their processing power comes from the cloud."

Health

Mobile health applications will play a large and important role in shaping the future of the health care system, wrote Mike Kirkwood at the mHealth initiative conference in February. He wrote that mobile and wireless health applications "directly impact the individual's health and have the promise of ensuring that when a patient leaves a doctor visit, they don't become "lost" in the system. It allows consumers to be engaged with health and wellness in their daily lives and connect back to their health care provider."

It's not just from within the health system where mobile services will change health care, it's also in the applications that consumers are downloading to their smart phones. In February I surveyed the latest health and fitness apps on the iPhone platform. For example, an iPhone app called Diamedic allows diabetics to record their blood sugar levels and insulin doses.

Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010:
- Part 1: Design & Development
- Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps
- Part 3: Emerging Markets

We'd love to discuss these and other mobile topics with you at our ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010. See our announcement post for more details.

If you're a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire, WorldMate, Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo.

AdMarvel, Opera and the iPhone

It's interesting to note that AdMarvel also offers an iPhone SDK for developers. At the time of the launch of the iPhone SDK, AdMarvel CEO described the iPhone as "an amazingly innovative platform." Opera hasn't announced any plans to bring its browser to the iPhone. When we talked to Opera's former CEO Jon von Tetzchner in December, he noted that the company wasn't averse to launching a browser on the iPhone, but Apple's App Store approval process was holding the company back from even trying to get an app into the store for the time being. It is worth noting, though, that Opera does offer an Android app.

Augmenting Revenue Streams Through Mobile Advertising

There can be little doubt that mobile advertising is one of the fastest growing markets in the mobile ecosystem. Google obviously wants a piece of this market through the AdMob acquisition. The company's own AdSense and AdWords programs offers mobile solutions, but the popularity of AdSense and AdWords hasn't really translated into success in the mobile space yet. Apple's acquisition of Quattro is a curious move, as advertising isn't exactly one of Apple's core competencies.

For Opera this move makes sense, though. Just like Apple hopes to profit directly from the iPhone apps and mobile sites that use Quattro, Opera will be able to profit from sites that use AdMarvel. Neither Apple nor Opera are traditional advertising companies, but both clearly believe that the mobile advertising market is poised for growth and that they can augment their current revenue streams by dipping their toes into this business.

Interestingly, with regards to ads in SMS messages, the numbers were pretty close (22.5% vs. 17.6%). This seems to be an area where the iPhone doesn't outshine other phones.

Of course, with the impending release of the Palm Pre and the large number of Android phones in the handset makers' pipeline, it will be interesting to see if these numbers will look similar on phones that are able to offer comparably compelling experiences (though, at least in the beginning, without the tens of thousands of apps that iPhone users have access to). It would be nice to see numbers that compare recall rates just for users of smartphones, like the iPhone or Blackberries. But for mobile advertisers, these are encouraging numbers, especially given that more and more users are drifting away from feature phones and towards smartphones like the iPhone.

The series is based on a conversation I had with Gustav Praekelt, a mobile entrepreneur located in South Africa. In this post we explore how mobile technology is being used for social good in Africa. See also Part 1 here.

The Mobile Phone's Expansive Reach and The Massive Outreach Opportunity

Africa is an expansive and growing mobile market. With 300 million mobile accounts and more being added each day, the mobile phone presents a far-reaching outreach opportunity for marketers. However, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are also excited at the possibility of being able to send messages to 300 million people at the push of a button.

The Praekelt Foundation, a charitable outreach of Praekelt Consulting , is taking their knowledge of web and mobile technologies and finding ways to help Africa's needy. The Foundation finds, attracts, and incubates projects to reach out to Africa's under-served populations. Praekelt Foundation's current projects are all health-focused, but the organization is actively seeking other avenues to assist Africa's Mobile-based under-served people.

SocialTxt

SocialTxt is a project that utilizes Please Call Me (PCM) systems. To understand what a PCM message is, one must look at the nature of the African mobile market. In North America, the vast majority of cell phone customers pay on a postpaid basis, meaning most of us pay X amount of dollars for Y amount of minutes. However in Africa, the opposite as true, roughly 85-90% of customers utilize pre-paid SIMs to make and receive mobile phone service. In some African countries like Nigeria, pre-paid customers account for as much as 95% of the mobile market.

In these pre-paid dominant markets, when you run out of call credit, you can't make outgoing calls or SMS messages. To get someone to call you, you might ring them once or beep them. To respond to all this traffic generated on the mobile phone network, mobile network operators invented Please Call Me messages as a way to prompt your friends or family to call you back. A Please Call Me message is merely a SMS-like message that prompts the recipient to call the number of the requester. The PCM messages are free to send for mobile customers, up to 6 per day.

PCM messages are extremely popular in South Africa, of which 30 million messages are sent a day in a country with a population of around 47 million people.

PCM messages, in recent years, have been used by advertisers and marketers as a vehicle for marketing. Praekelt and his colleagues saw the PCM system as a tool for social change. The Praekelt Foundation thereby approached a network operator about a year ago and convinced the company to work with the Foundation to conduct a trial of positive social impact advertising.

The PCM message offers 120 characters that the Foudation and it's partners to utilize. For example, a message can be sent to encourage the recipient to call an HIV call center or medical center. The messages fill a need, as Praekelt said, "This is not fancy technology and most of the PCM message users are at the bottom of the social economic chain. These are people who don't have TV's, so programs such as SocialTxt give companies and groups a great way to reach these previously un-reachable portions of the population."

To enhance the PCM message, Praekelt Foundation, in partnership with health-focused NGOs, can insert a WAP link to a mobile website or a phone number to an interactive voice response system allowing for further health-related information to reach HIV-stricken patients.

With SocialTxt, the Praekelt Foundation has teamed up with partners such as the national HIV/AIDS Call Centeres, People Opposing Women Abuse, Netcare/Vodocom Cleft Lip Campaign, and Khomanani Zithande Campaign.

TxtAlert

HIV/AIDS is a health epidemic at the forefront of Africa's focus for health outreach. Of 33 million people in the world who are HIV Positive, 22 million of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Of those 22 million, 5 million are in South Africa alone. This means, as Praekelt points out, that roughly 10% of the world's HIV-positive population lives in South Africa.

TxtAlert is a project that uses SMS messages to remind HIV patients to go to the health clinic for their next visit. In addition to notifying patients of the upcoming appointments, TxtAlert also requests them to reschedule if they are unable to attend. These efforts are aimed at keeping patients engaged in their treatment programs and to deter them from discontinuing their HIV/AIDS treatment programs.

The Praekelt Foundation's research found that even though most of the partner clinic's patients were jobless, more than 90% of these patients have at least one working cell phone in their household. Naturally, SMS is a viable communication method in such a situation.

In addition to prompting patients to attend their appointments, TxtAlert is being used by health clinics to incentivize those who come to the clinic as well. After a patient attends an appointment, TxtAlert will send the patient a text saying "Thank you for coming to the clinic, remember your next appointment is coming up on ". The patient will then receive a reminder text 90 days before the appointment, 2 weeks prior and so on. Well performing patients get free airtime and cell phones as incentives for coming in.

The Praekelt Foundation and partner clinics are experiencing favorable results with SocialTxt. On average, a typical clinic will have a 15% no-show rate for patient appointments. However, when a clinic utilizes SocialTxt, those rates drop to around 3%.

Praekelt points out that a great factor about SocialTxt is that deploying the system doesn't require vast amounts of capital and infrastructure. The main building block is an electronic patient record system and the rest is done behind the scenes by the TxtAlert software. The system is highly scalable as usage and needs rise. The Praekelt Foundation is currently working with a pilot clinic with about 10,000 users on the system. However, they are adding more clinics and will soon be up to 120,000 users on the SocialTxt system.

A third project utilizing SocialTxt will be unveiled at the Pop!Tech conference in October. Pop!Tech gave funding to the Praekelt Foundation to send out thousands of PCM messages regarding HIV/AIDs education.

Mobilisr

Mobile messaging is a far-reaching conduit for reaching a mass audience. The Praekelt Foundation, along with co-lead organization Cell-Life, is working to build an open source, high speed and highly reliable mobile messaging platform called Mobilisr.

Mobilisr could be used for health-related outreach, but also be used by governments and public-safety organizations to send out messages relating to: human rights monitoring, elections monitoring, emergency alerts, conducting public surveys, or could even be used by a group to organize protests.

Prakelt also told me that Mobilisr is enabling customers to conduct SMS voting (much like American Idol's text messaging voting system). The problem with the existing SMS voting systems, as he explains, is that they are built on proprietary systems. Te Prakelt Foundation is working with NGO's (such as Cell-Life) to build SMS based pledge lines and incentive systems built upon WAP sites.

Mobilisr just launched on October 1st. It will be interesting to see how the technology is employed by NGOs and other groups for social good.

Conclusion

With mobile phone technology spreading so rapidly across the African continent, there are many opportunities to reach out to Africa's under-served population. Any vehicle that offers access to the population should be exploited. It's a shame that many people in these groups are being ignored, even though many of them have mobile phones.

It is great to see organizations such as the Praekelt Foundation working with mobile network operators, health clinics, and NGOs to connect Africa's under-served population with the care and services they need to be happy, informed, and perhaps more healthy.

About The Author

Photo: Paul Watson

International Expansion

While its focus has been mostly on the U.K. and the U.S., AdMob has also seen a lot of growth in India, Europe, and a number of African countries, including South Africa. As Jason Spero, AdMob's VP of Marketing pointed out to us today, this international growth has been driven largely by AdMob's self-service advertising platform. However, the company is also planning to invest most of its newly raised money to establish and expand its staff and services in Western Europe, India, and South Africa. The company already has offices in London and Mumbai.

Downturn is Not Affecting Mobile Advertising (Yet?)

While speaking to Spero this morning, we also talked a bit about AdMob's reaction to the current economic downturn. Spero pointed out, that AdMob is not seeing any major cutbacks in mobile advertising spending so far, and that a number of companies are actually planning to expand their mobile advertising budget in 2009.

Android

AdMob is also quite bullish about Google's Android platform, though Spero also noted that any phone with a good user-experience for the mobile web is going to be a positive for the mobile advertising market. One handset Spero highlighted is Samsung's Instinct, which did not get a lot of hype from the tech press, but is doing very well on AdMob's advertising network.

The Right Time to Grow

While Sequoia has been quite downbeat about the economic downturn, this new round is drawn from its Growth Fund, which is geared towards later-stage companies. As Jason Spero pointed out to us, AdMob's partners think this is the right time to grow the company aggressively and tackle the international market more directly.

According to Nielson Mobile, a service of the consumer research-focused Nielson Company, 43 million Americans subscribe to mobile internet. Also, 33 million Americans use text messages, 32 million IM, 29 million download wallpapers/screensavers, and 4 million subscribe to and view mobile video.

However, when you break those numbers down by political preference, the following is true of mobile media in Q2 2008:

• Overall, 62% of Democrats are data users who use one or more data service on their mobile phone (compared with 55% of Republicans).
• Democrats are more likely than Republicans to use text messaging (53% compared with 46%).
• Democrats are more likely to use picture messaging and MMS (27% compared with 21%).
• Democrats are more likely to use mobile internet (17 % compared with 13%)

Apparently, someone already told the candidates of this news. It has been widely reported the numerous ways the Obama campaign makes use of mobile marketing for voter outreach. Already, they used SMS to announce Obama's VP choice. Unfortunately, the SMS message came after traditional journalists reported the news, not first, as originally promised. Still, the idea was unique and was the first attempt in leveraging the mobile medium in that way. In addition to the SMS VP announcement, the Obama campaign's mobile web site offers news, videos and ringtone and wallpaper downloads. 

The McCain camp has not been as active on the mobile front, but that's not to say that conservative voters don't use mobile media. Their use just isn't as heavy. In fact, Nielsen reports that the conservative-leaning web site The Drudge Report has a mobile audience of 567,000 uniques per month, for example.

To see how the numbers break down even further by Democrat vs Republican mobile data use, check out the chart below:

Why More Mobile Democrats?

There are a lot of conclusions one can come to from reviewing this data, but perhaps the most telling is that the campaigns really do know their demographics. Statistically, young voters are trending Democratic, and, as we all know by now, today's young voters are what are known as "digital natives." These plugged in, tech-savvy voters (also called "Generation Y") are now coming of age and many are eligible to vote for the first time. By marketing to this group of active technology users, the Obama campaign is hoping to motivate them to go out and vote. The recent launch of the official Obama iPhone app is just more proof of the campaign's efforts to actively engage this particular group of voters.

Many reports about Generation Y make note that they are known to be socially conscious and politically involved, but the election will likely be the first time we see if those generalizations are true. If Gen Y turns out the polls in great numbers, then they will have proven that they are indeed different than the other young generations of voters who preceded them. Typically an apathetic bunch when it comes to voting, young voters have not yet had the impact on U.S. elections that they could if they made the effort.

The Obama campaign seems to know that mobilizing these young voters may be as simple as interacting with them on the platforms they feel the most comfortable - the web, social networks, and their phone.

In the first two articles we looked at the history of scanning barcodes with your mobile phone, newspaper print ads, and a new effort to bring barcodes to web printouts. Now we'll look at other uses of the technology including scanning products in store, scanning broadcast media, and even exchanging contact information with others through the use of barcodes.

Things You Can Do Today

To get you excited about the promise of what barcoding can bring, we'll take a look at what you can do with barcodes today as well as some of the industry trends. Since barcoding is still new to the U.S., this may be old news to some of our international visitors, but bear with us...we're trying to catch up here!

1) Tag The World With Wikis

Instead of waiting for someone else to provide barcodes for you to scan, you can get involved with Semapedia instead. Semapedia.org is a non-profit project whose goal is to connect the physical world with relevant knowledge from Wikipedia. The community is encouraged to create 2D barcodes (QR Codes) and then venture out into the real world and attach them to objects. Any URL from Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks, and Wikisource can be used. While we love this innovative idea, a quick look at their map showed very few places where these codes have been used.

2) Exchange Contact Data With Your iPhone / Cameraphone

In Japan, you'll find QR codes everywhere including business cards, id cards, magazines, newspapers, flyers, posters, stickers, food products,puzzles, web sites, billboards,and more. (Thanks for the links, David Harper!) But here in the U.S. it seems we're still struggling to get the trend started. So why not let iPhone users lead the way? If you have an iPhone, there is one app that lets you exchange contact data with others through the use of barcodes - just like the Japanese do! The app is called QRContact (iTunes link) and it generates a contact's details as a barcode. To use it, you simply click on the "Address Book" button to select the person in your address book whose details you want to turn into a barcode. Of course, that means you'll have to enter your own information in your contacts in order to exchange the info with others.  The recipient would then only need a barcode reader application installed on their device in order to read the code and add the info to their address book. Do a search in iTunes for "barcode" and you'll find a few free readers to choose from that will do the trick.

3) Get Nerdy With Patches and Pillows

In an email from self-described "barcode nerd" John Young, we learned of all sorts of fun barcoded-related projects. He began by making a barcoded needlepoint pillow featuring a 2D barcode that linked to the Wikipedia page for pillow. After getting a little exposure on both BoingBoing and the NYT, he decided to extend the project and is now selling needlepoint canvases with custom QR Codes on them. You can find them here on Etsy: http://nerdlepoint.etsy.com.

After having so much fun with that, John decided to explore other wearables. Since so many people were already making and selling QR Code t-shirts (see our review of Japanese co. C-Shirt, too, if you're interested in how wearables work), he decided to venture into the world of patches instead. He launched the site http://p8tch.com where he sells velcro-backed "commando nerd patches." The system lets you change the target of your QR Code sort of like how TinyURL operates, so your patch can read something different whenever you want.

4) Scan Products In The Store (Coming Soon, Perhaps)

A company looking to take mobile barcode reading mainstream in the real world is StoreXperience. This m-commerce platform allows consumers to capture 2D barcodes from products. Consumers could then see product information, including local availability and customized offers right on their mobile handsets. StoreXperience isn't just limited to 2D barcodes, though. Their technology also supports RFID tags and soon 1D barcodes, too. Unfortunately, although StoreXperience has built a platform they aren't in any noteworthy stores as of today. We're disappointed that you can't actually use this technology yet, but we're keeping our eye on it.

John Young (see above) is now investigating the use of barcodes for real estate. He thinks it would be great if there was something (besides an infotube) which potential buyers could read while they're standing right there at the house. How about a mobile web-page linked by a barcode? To learn how to make your own barcode to do this too, keep reading...

6) Get Your Own Reader And Make Your Own Codes

Yesterday we mentioned the NeoReader, but as some pointed out, NeoMedia hasn't always played nice in this space. There are other readers you can use if you would rather support efforts of a more open nature. For example, the Kaywa Reader (go to http://reader.kaywa.com to see if your phone is supported); Google's zxing reader which was designed for Android but supposedly works on iPhone, too;  i-nigma; QuickMark; upcode; or, for Nokia phones, there's an entire web site devoted to barcodes at http://mobilecodes.nokia.com. You can also try semacode, connexto, or scanzoom. These last three may be helpful to owners of older Nokia phones that can't use the reader provided on the nokia.com site. In the EU only, you can try the reader from activeprint.org. The Japanese apparently don't need our help, but if you want to see what one of their readers looks like, check out camreader. Then prepare to be very jealous: in Japan, they can scan the barcodes of everyday objects to be taken to the mobile version of the Japanese Amazon.com for that product.

But here in the U.S. and other parts of the pre-barcoded world, you may wonder what good is it to have a reader if you don't have any codes. Maybe it's time for us to generate our own codes and let the business world catch up with our own innovation! Right now there are numerous sites that let you generate your own codes. What you choose to do with those codes is up to you. Make t-shirts, stickers, flyers, posters, or anything else you want. Try the Kaywa QR-code generator, Nokia Mobile Codes, Winksite (which can also generate codes for RSS feeds), Denso-Wave creators, DataMatrix generator by IDAutomation, QR Code Generator by NFC Games, viooli, or even the Firefox plugin Mobile Barcoder.

OK, Barcodes Are Cool, But Here's What You Should Be Worried About

If you're not much of a do-it-yourselfer, there's a good chance the technology will come to you. Earlier this month, CTIA announced a "Camera-Phone Based Barcode Scanning White Paper" (PDF) during a keynote event where they also demoed the technology. In the paper, they endorse two bar code formats: the open standard Data Matrix and the proprietary EZ Code. CTIA Vice-President of Wireless Internet Development Mark Desautels predicted that handsets using the technology will be widely available in 12-18 months.

On the surface, that sounds like good news: if you just wait, barcoding will come to you, right? As it turns out, it's not quite that simple. The proprietary EZ Code isn't read by anything except ScanLife by Scanbuy, so essentially, CTIA just endorsed one company's product. It's worth noting that Scanbuy was on the team defining the standard, Correction: Scanbuy was working with several carriers in a CTIA-initiated trial that contributed to the results of the white paper (as well as explaining to carrier executives how it should work), too. Opinion: Conflict of interest much?

The other standard supported by CTIA, DataMatrix, is an open standard and is free. Well, except for having to go through the Scanbuy gateway for processing. What that means is that in the indirect DataMatrix model, you ca't embed a URL in the barcode that resolves directly by DNS to a web address. Instead, the codes are given an ID number and these IDs are sent to a gateway for processing - a sort of man-in-the-middle (and potential bottleneck) who monitors the "clicks."

That's why the barcoding advocates here in the U.S. want you to support the open QR Code format. This is the more popular format internationally and is used in other countries like Japan, Australia, UK, and elsewhere. Thanks to its open format and freely available readers, innovation has flourished.

There are plenty of companies ready for this technology when it arrives. For example, CEO Ron Feldman of the text messaging reminder service Kwiry tells us that they plan to implement 2D/Mobile Bar Code input support when a critical mass of phones/consumers are actually capable of using this technology. Hopefully, that's only a matter of time.

Photo Credit: QR Scanning: PSD; QRCode Future: avlxyz

See also: The Scannable World, Part 1: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
The Scannable World, Part 2: Scanning Your Web Printouts

In "The Scannable World: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners," we introduced the concept of using your phone to scan barcoded objects in the real world. We also touched on some of the history surrounding this technology. One of the issues with barcoded ads today is where you find them: newspapers, arguably a dying medium whose subscriber base isn't necessarily composed of cutting-edge early adopters. So how can barcodes make their way to the people who actually use the web and other modern technologies? One company thinks they have the answer.

Neomedia is ready for the barcode trend to take off. They've been around for a decade and have had the technology for reading barcodes with mobile phones in place for years. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of modern mobile phones, they are poised for success if this trend ever takes off. Their barcode scanning software lets you access mobile web content by scanning ads from print, packaging, billboards, and even broadcast media.

The Printed Out Web

No matter how tech savvy you are, there are still times when you simply must print out something from the web. Driving directions are a great example. Now imagine that your printout looked something like this (see below) - directions at the top with a scannable ad for a hotel at the bottom of the page:

That printout isn't a prototype, but a real ad available today from RandMcNally.com. The ad is made possible through NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics, a company that works with web publishers and advertisers to help transform web pages into readable printouts which can then be monetized with ads. The company's "Clean Print" technology is a real-time dynamic reformatting engine that harvests a page's content and then produces a printed page in a coherent format without odd line breaks, cut off images, etc. Clean Print will also work no matter how the end user decides to print - whether "Ctrl + P" is pressed or a print button is used, the results are the same.

Any site using Clean Print technology can now include barcoded ads alongside their content. This is great for driving directions, but also for articles that tend to be printed out and shared, such as those from online news sites. (Don't believe it? Just look at the uproar over the RWW print button, for example). Below is an example of what that looks like. The article is from The Orange County Register's site and the ad is for Crocs footwear.

Since the partnership between NeoMedia and Format Dynamics is still brand new, there aren't many other examples just yet. But Format Dynamics is already serving ads and reformatting the printed web pages of approximately 80 web publishers, including Rand McNally, CareerBuilder, the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post, the Houston Chronicle, and a few others. In time, NeoMedia will extend their barcode offering to more of these clients.

How To Scan: NeoMedia's NeoReader

NeoReader is the barcode scanning software. It's not a separate piece of hardware, but software that runs on your phone. NeoReader currently works on iPhone, Java, Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. The only missing platform is Android, but the company plans to include that at a later time. Even without Android, the company has managed to cover most of the smartphone market as well as many of today's standard phones via their Java offering. (You can see a full manufacturer's list here).

To download the application, just go to get.neoreader.com from your handset's web browser and follow the instructions. If your handset is not supported, you can still access the NeoReader program. Just bookmark the URL get.neoreader.com/go. This web page will let you enter keywords and barcodes in order to access the same content available to users of the mobile application. iPhone users can simply download the NeoReader application from the iTunes App Store.

Android has been announced but it isn't actually out yet, so we can't compare NeoReader to Android's barcode scanning apps like CompareEverywhere or GoCart. On the iPhone, though, NeoReader is not the only barcode reading app currently available - there are several to choose from. In function and feature set, the difference between most of those apps and NeoReader is minimal. Like many of those other iPhone apps, NeoReader also lets you build your own barcode if you so desire. You can create a barcode for any URL just by going to http://www.neoreader.com/code.html and entering in the URL you want to convert.

Make a Barcode:

The real difference between NeoReader simply comes down to the fact that NeoMedia is a business that's trying to make barcode scanning a reality...it's not an app put out by an independent developer. NeoReader already has a handful of sites where it can be used and over the coming weeks they will be able to add to their list as their partnership with Format Dynamics deepens.

Is This The Answer?

With the rising popularity of camera phones, smartphones, and better web browsers for surfing the "real" internet at higher 3G speeds, there's an improved chance for a technology like barcoded ads to take off. However, for it to really become truly successful a lot of advertisers and big-name companies will have to get on board and consistently offer barcoded ads for an extended period of time - not just try it once and then give up, claiming them a failure. In today's uncertain economy, the number of advertisers willing to take this chance may be low.

NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics means they are able to offer a good selection of web sites where you can find the technology in use. That's a good start at least, but ultimately the technology will come down to consumers' willingness to interact with the real world in this virtual manner. The expectation behind this whole barcoded ad platform is that people will see the advertisement and then take an extra step to learn more about the product or service. Is that even how today's consumers interact with ads? In our media-saturated culture, most consumers run from ads, not the other way around.

Will adding barcodes make viewing ads a more engaging experience or will consumers continue to ignore ads like they do today? That's a hard question to answer with a technology so new and untested, but it's possible that, if done well, barcode scanning could work. The trick may be to provide an added value to the customer who takes the time to scan. That added value could be a discount, a free gift with purchase, or something else of a compelling nature to the potential customer. That could make barcode scanning the coupon clipping of the 21st century...and that might actually work. Scan to save. We would do it. Would you?

See also: The Scannable World, Part 1: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
The Scannable World, Part 3: Barcode Scanning In The Real World

One of the promises of the mobile web was the possibility of being able to integrate the internet with the real world. One of the ways to accomplish this task is through the use of barcodes. The idea is that you take a picture of the barcode with your camera phone and you're then delivered to a mobile web site. This could effectively make anything - whether a poster, an ad, or an object - a virtual part of the world wide web. Although this technology has been available for years, it's only now with the birth of the smartphone, or more precisely, the next-gen smartphone, that the potential for this type of integration may finally be realized.

Smartphones have been around for years, but even though every business worker had a Blackberry glued to their hip, it wasn't until the iPhone that the true potential of smartphones was realized. These are no longer phones, but tiny, portable computers we fill with our favorite applications. The iPhone paved the way for the next generation of these "computer phones," but it isn't your only choice - Google has now entered the game. Yesterday, we saw the launch of the iPhone's first competitor, the T-Mobile G1. Around the corner both RIM and Windows Mobile are preparing their new phones and OS's, too.

Now that we have new, usable, app-friendly, and yes, downright fun, mini computers in our pockets, will we began to interact with the real world in different ways? There is that possibility. And one of (supposed) future trends for the mobile web is the scanning of barcodes to interact with real-world objects.

Failures and New Attempts

In 2000, an internet technology startup, Digital Convergence, saw their :CueCat barcodes appear in newspapers and magazines all over the U.S. Unfortunately, this company required a separate piece of hardware in order to read the barcodes, so, as you may have gathered, the technology didn't quite take off as no one wanted to carry around yet another device for the sole purpose of scanning ads.

Then, at the beginning of this year, Google attempted to revitalize the barcode again. This time, through their Print Ads service. Advertisers can choose to include barcodes that will appear in newspapers and are readable with any camera phone. The Print Ad publisher network from Google provides access to 800 newspapers, representing nearly 70% of all U.S. paid circulation. Although thousands of advertisers have Google Print Ads, the barcodes themselves haven't hit mainstream usage yet. When asked about conversion rates for barcode "clickthoughs" or the percentage of advertisers using and renewing this service, Google won't disclose any details. If the program were a raging success, there's no doubt that those numbers would be happily shared as proof of the technology's potential.

But we can't blame Google for wanting to keep quiet about the barcodes and their lack of adoption. This is still very much an emerging technology where success is largely unproven. And in our unstable economy, advertisers may be hesitant to use such a risky and unproven option for their ads.

Newspapers May Be The Wrong Medium

It's possible that the failure of the barcode to gain traction could be simply a case of marketing to the wrong demographic. Let's be honest, the people who still take a daily newspaper instead of getting their news via the TV or web aren't, in general, likely to be the most cutting-edge technology enthusiasts. So, the question remains: how can you get the attention of hippest web users when your scannable barcodes are on paper, not screens? And once you have early adopter involvement, how can this technology go mainstream?

In part two of this post, continued tomorrow, we'll look at a company that thinks they may have that answer...stay tuned.

See also: The Scannable World, Part 2: Scanning Your Web Printouts
The Scannable World, Part 3: Barcode Scanning In The Real World