Opposable Brain

Microsoft Tag

Phone-scannable tags are an old idea, but Microsoft has actually produced a surprisingly decent implementation, in the form of MS Tag. For instance, here is the "url" tag for my photo galleries:

I was able to snap this awful picture of it, straight from the screen, and the software interpreted it without a hitch and sent me on to the website.

In addition to URLs, you can also create "dialer" tags, which tell the phone to dial a number, "business card" tags, which contain contact info for your addressbook, or you can make up "free text" tags. The tag is just a reference; all of the information resides on the server, and the phone needs internet to get to it. But it's pretty quick.

All major phone platforms are supported, including Blackberries, iPhones, Androids, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, among others. The integration with the native software on my BB was truly flawless, and well-thought-out. It was almost hard to believe this was a Microsoft product. But then...

The only image formats supported by the tag creator are PDF, WMF, and XPS. Really, not a PNG or a JPEG, even? Now this is more like it: take a great idea, do an decent job all the way, then leave out one tiny little frustrating detail, so that I have to run a command line conversion before I can post any of the tags. Or maybe they're trying to push their own formats, which would be just another example of a flawed business model ruining their products. Still, I'm kinda tempted to put one of these on a business card.

Posted by rodin at January 13, 2009 10:51 AM | TrackBack