I love learning about new technologies, even when I don’t really know what they’ll be useful for. Here’s a great example: if you know what the image below is, then you can call me.
Huh? The image above is a Microsoft Tag – a four colour bar code. It’s similar to the QR codes you may occasionally see around (most notably on mandarin orange boxes). However, it’s got two advantages:
1) It works in both low light and if you’ve got a poor camera on your phone (those QR codes can be really tough to read with the crappy camera on your iPhone)
2) They can be set to trigger actions: go to a url, download contact info, send a text or place a call
I’ve set the one above to call me. But, you won’t actually get ‘my’ phone number. Instead, it’s going to place a call to Google Voice. It’ll call my Voice number, which will then ring both my work phone and my cell phone. However, it will only call my work number during business hours and it won’t call my cell phone late at night when I should be sleeping. And, if you start spam calling me, I’ll add you to my list of blocked callers, so you’ll just get voicemail instead.
Kind of cool, eh? Add the tag reader app to your phone and give me a call if you want to talk about it more.