Guide Them In With Your Own Custom QR Codes

Customized Tech's custom QR Code (give it a try)

QR codes or quick response codes are a new type of matrix barcode that are quickly gaining traction all around the world.  Although they were invented in 1994, consumer technology was not yet developed enough for businesses and consumers to make good use of them.  With the advent of the smartphone age this has quickly changed and they are becoming a common sight in magazines, on billboards, and all over the internet. One common use of them is to direct you to an App's page on the Android Market.  There are many apps available on Android to scan QR codes with my favorite being QR Droid.  On iOS, QR Reader seems to be the best app for scanning QR codes although there are a great number of them available in the App Store.  Both Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry OS 7 have the ability to scan QR codes baked right into the operating system.  The Blackberry OS can scan them natively through App World and Windows Phone 7 can scan them through Bing.  While the ability to scan and use QR codes in our daily life is useful, those of us who run small businesses or blogs can make better use of them by creating our own to easily attract attention to our brands or products.

Android Disguised as Windows Phone 7

If you have seen even a commercial for Windows Phone 7 or some of the news coverage regarding Windows 8 then this user interface will definitely look familiar.  This user interface is known as Metro UI.  It was designed to set Microsoft's new smartphone operating system apart from the rest and to give consumers something fresh.  It has also most likely helped Microsoft avoid the lawsuits that many other hardware manufacturers have become involved in with Apple.  Nonetheless the operating system does stand out from the crowd and gives users a much easier way to interact with their phone without being sucked in to it like many iOS and Android users have been.  This idea is really driven home by the tagline at the end of many Windows Phone 7 commercials: "It's time for a phone to save us from our phones."  However this is where the user interface truly shines.  However, today's smartphone consumers crave applications, something that Microsoft has quite few of.  Plus until the release of the next iteration of its operating system called Mango, Microsoft is still missing a few features its competitors have making Windows Phone 7 an unlikely choice for most consumers.