Google creates ad tool of the future… what about today?

Last week, Google announced a plan to use 2D barcodes to help make advertising more useful for readers. It’s a good idea, and one that has a lot in common with kwiry. With Google’s 2D barcodes, people use their camera phones to snap a picture of a code in an ad. The picture is decoded using special software, and users are then taken to a mobile website with product info, discounts, contests, etc. However, this process requires users to have a camera, decoding software, and a data plan on their phone for it to work. That means more than 85% of us are left out! We know there’s a better way to connect people with things they want to remember/learn more about… we built it!

With kwiry, we wanted to make it easy for everyone to bring stuff from the real world onto their computers – products from ads, things they needed to do, or stuff to remember. We knew that barcodes had been tried before, and were limiting not only in what you could do with them, but also in the equipment necessary to make them work. We learned from those experiences and created kwiry to run on many types of input, beginning with text messaging – something nearly every phone is capable of and most people can easily do.

It’s great that Google is trying to solve the problem of making the real world more interactive, and offline advertising more measurable. One day you might see these barcodes in the US as you do in Japan or Europe as Google mentions. However, for today’s average consumer, and thus advertisers, Google’s solution is too complex and too costly to be effective. Until phones, software, and mobile data plans evolve such that 80% of phones are 2D barcode-capable, it will be difficult to achieve success with barcodes in advertising.

kwiry’s method is still the simplest solution for people to remember things on the go and connect with companies they’re interested in. (even Valleywag agrees)