August 3, 2007
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- If you should ever pass a tree, wall or pillar with what looks like a badly thought-out company logo stuck to it, take a picture with your cellphone. You may learn something.
What you'd be looking at is a Semapedia tag, a printout containing something called a QR bar code. Software on your camera phone will read the bar code just as one of those scanners in a supermarket would, but instead of a price it would decode a link to a Web page on the peer-produced online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Your phone would take you to that Web page, which would contain information about the surroundings -- the street, the building, the town -- you were standing in. There are thousands of these tags around the world: A particularly popular one seems to be at the Buddhist temple of Borobudur in the middle of Indonesia's Java island, although no one seems to know who put it there (both the tag and the temple).
It's tied to what I wrote about a couple of weeks ago: ambient findability1, or the idea that anyone can find anything at any time. In that column I was talking about finding my car keys; here we're talking about finding information. More specifically, hooking up information -- what we want to know -- with connectivity: getting that information to us where we need it. As American Alexis Rondeau, 28, one of the duo who dreamed up the nonprofit Semapedia project in 2005, puts it: "The idea behind this is that we believe bringing information to the place or thing makes virtual information relevant beyond what we have experienced so far."
In fact, things like this aren't particularly new. Marketing companies have been trying to get us to click on billboards with Bluetooth phones for some years. We've been told that soon we'll be able to scan products in shops and figure out whether we could get them cheaper down the road, although no service like this is yet in place. And, at least in Japan, using phones to access additional information is already pretty commonplace, with cellphone-readable bar codes used to provide links to bus timetables, product and allergy information and details in magazine and billboard advertisements.
The idea is spreading. Keith Russell, Hong Kong-based business development manager for Scottish mobile ticketing company Mobiqa, says his company has seen the bar code take off in the U.S. as a device to deliver event tickets to cellphones. Singapore Press Holdings has launched a service in the city-state called ZapCode that allows people to access information via a colorful bar code -- whether it's on billboard five meters away or the address on a missing dog's collar. Mr. Russell describes the concept as "convenient, cool and very cheap."
But what I like about Semapedia (the "sema" is from the Greek for "sign," and the "pedia" is from encyclopedia, via Wikipedia) is that it isn't about advertising, or selling or buying stuff; it's about bringing knowledge to the place you're at. It's something any of us can contribute to and use. And, unlike its commercial brethren, it's an open standard, meaning anyone can peer inside it and use it. It's also pretty simple.
It works like this. Say you want to spread the word about a neighborhood landmark: You find the appropriate page on Wikipedia, copy the Web address, the line beginning "http:" at the top of the browser, into the special box on the Semapedia site (www.semapedia.org2). That will convert the link into a QR bar code and then into a document, split into eight identical miniposters containing the bar code and a message for people who see them, explaining what they are. Print out the document and you're ready to go.
To read one of these bar codes you need to have a camera phone and the right software. Semapedia offers links to the software for your model of handset; you may already find the software installed on your phone. Launch the software, and point your camera at the bar code. The software will take a moment or two to focus on the code and read it, but should soon throw up the message in the code -- in Semapedia's case, a link to a Wikipedia page containing the information about the place you're standing on/in/under/beside.
Of course, you need to be the kind of person who has a camera phone with an Internet connection, and who thinks "Ooh! I'm going out, I should download bar code-reading software in case I bump into a bar code on a lamppost." And, if you are that kind of person, you may just as well enter the name of the place or thing you're looking at in your mobile phone's search engine. But that's slower, more awkward (all those //s and .s) and, frankly, less fun (not to mention the fact that you may be looking at something you don't know the name of, either because you're not as bright as you thought you were or because you don't speak or read the local language).
Besides, a mobile encyclopedia is just the start of things. These bar codes make it possible for anything to be readable by your cellphone -- short encoded messages, telephone numbers, email addresses, links to your blog -- and for them to be put more or less anywhere (a cellphone camera can read them as easily on a screen as on paper). It's one small step toward what people are calling an Internet of Things. Or, as Mr. Rondeau puts it, it's "kind of like turning the world into a clickable Web page."
And, once you get the hang of it, it's pretty appealing. Semapedia co-founder Stan Wiechers discovered this recently when he was affixing a Semapedia tag to a public toilets sign in Beijing and an irate security guard tore it up. So Mr. Wiechers took out his cellphone and showed him what he was doing. By clicking on the bar code, he showed the guard, anyone could see the Wikipedia entry on the history of public toilets (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet#Public_toilets3 -- a compelling read, I assure you). The guard was impressed enough to call over some colleagues. The tag went back up. "Once he understood, he accepted the tag," Mr. Wiechers recalled. "It's a natural desire of people to want to know more about places." Even if they're toilets.
--Email me at jeremy@loose-wire.com4 URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118607066711486214.html
Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118486243657771817.html (2) http://www.semapedia.org (3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet#Public_toilets (4) mailto:jeremy@loose-wire.com
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