What is a QR Code?
QR Codes, a two-dimensional bar code system, is a widely used technology in Japan and other foreign countries, and is quickly becoming popular in the northern United States. QR is short for Quick Response (they can be read quickly by a cell phone), and they are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone. You may soon see QR Codes in a magazine advertisement, on a billboard, a web page or even on someone’s t-shirt. In fact, you have probably already seen them without realizing what you were looking at.
Once you scan a QR code with your smart phone or tablet device, it may give you details about a business, or the person wearing a QR code on their t-shirt. Or it the code can be generated to place a phone call or submit a text message upon scanning. In any case, the reason why they are more useful than a standard barcode is that they can store (and digitally present) much more data, including url links, geo coordinates, and text. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a chunky hand-held scanner to scan them, many modern cell phones can scan them.
We decided to take advantage of the rising popularity of this technology, and have already started adding custom QR codes to the yard signs on all of our team’s listings, that will direct a user to a listing-specific webpage with information, pictures, and much more about the listing they are sitting in front of! We are very excited to offer this service to our clients, so keep an eye out in the coming weeks, as we outfit all of our signs, both residential and commercial, with yet another avenue to our clients’ properties!
If you have an iPhone or Android phone, here are a couple QR Scanning apps that you can download directly from the links provided:
iPhone Apps:
“Scan” – http://www.itunes.com/app/scan (free)
“QuickMark” – http://www.itunes.com/app/quickmark ($1.99)
Android Apps:
”QuickMark” – https://market.android.com/details?id=tw.com.quickmark (free)
“QR Droid” – https://market.android.com/details?id=la.droid.qr (free)
