![]() ![]() They’re a little larger than we’d like ideally, but not so large as to eliminate their use. QR Codes have the additional benefit of highlighting online-only editorial features with an eye-catching and distinctly digital visual element, something that all the little typographic tricks and shaded boxes under the sun can’t quite replicate. Snap a picture of the QR Code, and you’ll soon be listening to an editorial overview of an important study in orthopaedic surgery. One of the commentaries we’re experimenting with is an audio commentary. Take a picture of the page you’re looking at, read the commentary, and you’re better informed. The written commentaries are hosted on a blogging platform, which has an auto-sensing mobile rendering feature. QR Codes are printed on JBJS articles that have associated online-only commentaries from experts, which provide additional context and opinion. About the same time, thanks to market research, we’d learned that our readers have also been growing more comfortable with their smartphones as information appliances. Then, in late Fall, an advertiser approached us with an ad featuring a QR Code. We’d been batting the idea around for months. Brands in the US that have used them in the past year include Google, the Weather Channel, Best Buy, Fort, Starbucks, Facebook, Calvin Klein, the City of New York, HBO, Iron Man 2, New York magazine, AT&T, and Clinique.Īnd I don’t know if this is a first, but the journal I run - the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery - has just introduced QR Codes on selected editorial pages, in a special advertising page, and as part of print-online sponsorships for free access to premium videos. Popular in Japan for years and increasingly accessible because of the proliferation of phones with cameras, Web access, and pre-installed QR readers here, QR Codes now seem poised to go mainstream in the US. QR Codes are little boxes of printed programming (bits and bytes in binary black and white) which, when photographed using a cell phone that has the right kind of software, can make the cell phones do things like visit a Web site, start an email, start a text, or initiate a purchase. Recently, an interesting blog post described 22 ways not-for-profits can use QR Codes to further their missions. QR Codes fit with ease into the installed mobile computing environment.īack in 2009, Michael Clarke wrote here about an initiative Google had undertaken to deploy QR Code stickers far and wide as part of creating an augmented reality experience for people whose cell phones have cameras and QR Code readers. One big difference this time is the ubiquity of mobile computing thanks to cell phones - a ubiquity identified last year by Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker, with usability differences described wonderfully in a slideshow we featured last September. Now, another path for integration seems to be opening - the QR Code on mobile platforms. It wasn’t an ideal usability arrangement. One of the big challenges was that when people were using print, they were often reading in their armchairs or in the lunch room while our tools for migrating them online required them to go back to their desks. Integrating print and online has been fraught with futility and clumsy solutions, from URLs printed in reference lists, to rafters of services promoted in print to entice readers online, to the more memorable but ill-fated CueCat. ![]()
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