[Encoded: 140 Characters] This is called a QR Code. It is a machine readable barcode. Most smart phones and every Android Phone can read these. 

These will help everyone because they allow is to store information without loss of quality over time and without energy to maintain. Today we keep information on the internet or our drives and media cards. These codes store information in our environment.

 [Encoded: "love"] QR codes can be very simple and expand in complexity with the volume of information they represent. They hold up to 4,296 characters 7,089 numbers. Right now they can be read by an average smart phone reliably up to about 140 Characters. This is because there are differences in the resolution of cellphone cameras and the abilities of the apps used to scan them. Reliability means how easily can a person scan and retrieve the data. The code at the top of this post contains 140 characters. The smaller code to the left represents 4 letters "love".

 [Encoded: A Random String of 1,824 1's and 0's] The uses for these are vast, but the public must first understand, experience and accept these as an acceptable form of communication. There are many who believe QR Codes, as they are, are VISUAL NOISE that does harm to communication and design. Art Directors already have shuffled the barcodes on items to the back of the box (and bottom when they can get away with it), now they are being asked to take something that literally looks like TV static and place it in a prominent position in communication designs.

The counter point is that information and data doesn't need to travel over the internet if it can be kept right in the physical area where the user is. Others say that scanning information beats poking at a tiny touch phone keyboard and risking a typo. 

[Encoded: Pi Calculated to the 1824th place] I agree that the QR Codes are visual noise and long for the day we come up with a system that looks less "staticky", but every time I see them used well, their elegance is undeniable. As beings who eat and sleep, we value the art of doing more with less and the material efficiency of a well used QR Code is breathtaking. For example: A single QR Code displayed on the ceiling of the terminal at Grand Central Station could reliably serve train schedules to the 5.25 million passengers that travel through it each week without using the internet, a hard drive or a single watt of electricity.

[Encoded: Paragraph 6 of this post] Information on how to encode your own QR codes can be found at http://code.google.com/p/zxing/ and a simple QR Generator is located at http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/ To avoid any asset management issues (remembering what data which codes contain) I use the Google Chart API to dynamically generate codes upon request. Information on how to do that is at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/types.html#qrcodes 

Happy Encoding!

Sid Gabriel

http://twitter.com/sidgabriel | http://TheTechnologist.TV