These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the Locialia team, formed by Stuart Thomasand German Del Zotto.
QR codes meaning Quick Response, also called BIDI or Bi-dimensional codes, are an exciting innovation to take e-commerce to the next level. This codes could store a lot of information, so are really powerful.
These 2D barcodes have a number of very interesting uses enabling among other things, direct response advertising and proof of payment. For example, they can be used to store URLs or phone numbers on an advert. or they can also be used on tickets or on discount coupons used at the point of purchase at the till. Both of these can be used to faciliatate advancing the potential customer along the sales pipeline toward purchase.
QR codes can even be used to show proof of purchase and obviate the need to pay in cash or present a credit card in a shop. Pay online but pick up in-store. In this way they help the growth of ecommerce.
QR or BIDI codes close the gap between the real world and the e-world. They are most useful on mobiles, as you can use your camera and a special app to read the codes or use your mobile screen to present the codes to be read by the retailer.
They are very useful as a tracking device for businesses as they can electronically measure the number of people/response ratio from different adverts in different media and therefore measure ROI.
Locialia are planning to use these codes to allow people to signup to a special offer by generating such a code to either print out or show on their mobile screen so they can claim a special offer.
