So, is this a one-off or the first domino to fall in the mobile data Vs. WiFi wars? It’s difficult to tell right now but mobile carriers worldwide will be watching with interest to see if Virgin’s play disrupts the market enough to mean that they have to follow suit. If so, there will probably be a land-grab to be each city’s free Wi-Fi provider (and get hold of the ad revenue that will probably be used to support the free services).  It has already been announced here in New Zealand that Wellington will provide free WiFi in the CBD for the period of the Rugby World Cup 2011 but whether this will extend beyond the RWC event is unclear at present.

The bottom line is that this is yet another move in the market to mean that mobile engagement just continues to get easier and cheaper for consumers. We like that, we really do.

Read the source article

Debbie has written a great article in today’s New Zealand Herald on the benefits that QR Codes can bring small-to-medium businesses. Debbie’s article is perfectly pitched and the list of usage scenarios will appeal to the Herald’s wide readership.

It’s wonderful to have someone of Debbie’s calibre introduce a whole new audience to QR Codes. Nice work Debbie!

Interested in using QR Codes for yourself or your business? Why not try out our free trial to get up and running in a matter of minutes?

For locals and visiting kiwis this means another barrier to regular mobile engagement has fallen – no longer will people be worried about mobile data tariffs. This is great news! Furthermore, and probably more importantly with the forthcoming Rugby World Cup 2011, international visitors will be able to keep in touch with their social network circles, check their mail, and basically stay connected without losing sleep worrying if they’ll need to mortgage their house on their return to pay for their mobile bill!

Sure, there’s an ad-supported ‘splash page’ which appears at the beginning of a mobile data session and then every 30 minutes but that’s a pretty low price to pay for otherwise free comms.

Will Auckland follow suit? Well, the only offering thus far is the Auckland City Wifi Service which is a paid service. This isn’t all bad news though as this means that the infrastructure is in place (that’s the hard part) so now it’s down to the council finding some cash to pay the private partners involved to open up the network for free. C’mon Auckland, let’s get people online and transacting – surely the benefits of more mCommerce outweigh the income from the WiFi service?

Free ubiquitous mobile data means more mobile engagement, which leads to more mobile transaction opportunities – sounds good to us and to NZ Inc. in general.

HardLinkLive shows the most recent public HardLink Snaps, mapped alongside their custom-formatted Tweet so you can see what got Snapped, where it happened and what the Twitterverse saw as a result. We have to admit that watching what’s getting Snapped around the world is an amazing experience for us – it’s somewhat humbling to see HardLink reaching far-flung parts of the globe!

HardLinkLive also displays live statistics comparing the popularity of Tag formats, mobile devices being used to Snap Tags and which search engines are crawling our content. The total daily number of public HardLink Snaps makes up the rest of our live content giving you a great view into HardLink activity, and the global Mobile Tagging community.

A live view of HardLink activity wouldn’t be complete without a Twitter feed from our @HardLinkLive account. The Twitter feed lets you quickly browse the most recent HardLink tweets.

Please check out HardLinkLive and let us know what you think.

One fact that bodes very well indeed for future QR Code success is the 938% year on year increase in the number of users that have a QR Code reader on their mobile device. We support the conclusion that general exposure to and familiarity with QR Codes has driven this increase.

It’s very interesting to see that over 60% of users scanning QR Codes are over 35, and almost 85% are over 25. So, if you thought this was just a concept that would appeal to the youth market, then this should be a wake-up call. QR Codes are being scanned by the high-earning 30-somethings – this is an opportunity to reach a valuable demographic that is traditionally hard to engage through other media.

Regular engagement is growing too, with 22% of users scanning more than 5 QR Codes in the quarter. Indeed, 62% of users scanned more than one QR Code in the quarter leading to a conclusion that this isn’t a one-off activity. Once people start scanning QR Codes, they continue to do so.

The one fact that surprised us was that the vast majority of QR Code scanning occurs from Social Media sources, not from the ‘real world’ combination of physical world, print media and TV. However, TV scanning is accelerating rapidly (46% from 2H 2010) so this may well start to change soon. This does show, however, that QR Code campaigns spread virally exceptionally well.

Our thanks go to Mobio for the superb work done on this report – if you’re at all interested in this space, you really must read the full report.

Bing Vision appears to be a Google Goggles-competitor but with a big difference in that it can read 1D barcodes, QR Codes and Microsoft Tags. We really hope this will deliver a unified Tag Reader at last! And, who knows, maybe after the Mango release Bing Vision will be ported to iOS, Android and so on? A single reader for pretty much any Mobile Tag? We can’t wait…

The extremely influential tech blog, GigaOM, has published a great article on how QR Codes are looking to be the US Summer’s breakaway hit. Interestingly they compare and contrast Near Field Communication (NFC) and QR Codes, including asking whether there is room in the market for both technologies.

NFC is a great technology for payments but has an inherent cost due to the special hardware required. QR Codes (and other Mobile Tag formats) are effectively free to produce and distribute, making them easier and quicker to get up and running with – in addition, the ease of distribution gives QR Codes unequalled reach. You physically have to be Near an NFC Tag so you can’t share an NFC Tag with your friends by just sending an image of it.

NFC and Mobile Tags, while similar in some respects, are fundamentally different in others – to ask whether there is sufficient space in the market for both is akin to asking if there is room in the fruit market for apples and oranges. Sure there is, just choose the one that gives you what you want on a case by case basis.

The Luxury Daily article explains a range of approaches being used by Barneys New York to get the most out of QR Codes.  One interesting departure from the norm is the decision to use QR codes to encourage customers to visit the store rather than drive mCommerce uptake – this makes perfect sense considering Barneys assertion that customers are less likely to buy luxury goods online.

This all goes to prove that there’s no substitute for knowing your audience – Mobile Tagging is a great tool to assist and ease your customers’ behaviour, but trying to use it to change that behaviour is a dangerous direction to take.

This week we’ve released a new update that dramatically improves the performance of our GPS support, in some cases we’ve recorded a 80% decrease in the time taken for the process.

So, please do try out the new and improved GPS support – just select ‘Capture End User Location’ on a Campaign Item and we’ll request the GPS location of the end user’s device from that point onwards. If you haven’t got a HardLink account then sign up for a free trial one.

Let us know what you think about the improvements – and if you have other ideas for new functionality, we’d love to hear from you!

We’ve been tweeting out Snaps on public HardLink items for a while now but everything was tweeted to our HardLink timeline under the @HardLinkLive Twitter account. You’ve always been able to control whether a specific Campaign Item’s Snaps would be tweeted but that was about all you could do as far as customising how HardLink talked to Twitter. Well, now all that’s changed!

We just released the ability for HardLink account holders to associate their Twitter account and tweet out their HardLink Snaps on that account. This means your own Twitter presence can now include your real-to-virtual campaign activity. We’ve even gone further than this by allowing you to specify a custom tweet template for every Campaign and Campaign item – the result is that Snaps on different Campaign Items (basically, different QR Codes, MS Tags and Short URLS etc.) can publish completely different tweet content to your Twitter account.

The tweet templates can include HardLink information such as the country in which the Snap occurred, the device that was used, the HardLink short URL for the Campaign Item (allowing your followers to just click the link and join in the fun!!!) and more.

Integrating your HardLink account with Twitter is free of charge and there’s no charge for tweets either, so there’s no reason not to spread the word on how well your real-to-virtual campaign is going!

We think this new release adds a huge amount of flexibility to how HardLink leverages the power of Twitter. Other social network integration will be coming soon so watch this space.

You can try HardLink’s Twitter integration out by signing up for a free trial HardLink account.

Simply fill in a few details and you’ll be enjoying all the benefits of HardLink completely free of charge and with no obligation for 6 weeks. Our free trial is fully functional with absolutely no features disabled so you can play with geo-location, Twitter integration, Well-Known-Devices and all the rest of the HardLink goodness!

After your 6 week trial period you can choose to walk away, no questions asked, or convert to our standard pricing model. For the future, we’re planning an always-free option which will be backed by some advertising. We’re figuring out how to make this work for clients and consumers alike without being too irritating / obtrusive so more news on this soon.

Sign up for a HardLink free trial account now.

Read the terms and conditions for free trial accounts.