The 101 on 2 dimensional barcodes

As you may know, part of snapizzi's platform is based on the use of 2 dimensional barcodes. 2D barcodes are hugely popular in Asia and Europe but are pretty new in North America. 2D barcodes are incredibly beneficial as they can store a few hundred times more information than ordinary barcodes and offer an extraordinary variety of B2C and B2B applications that are just beginning to be explored.

Today, 2D barcodes are primarily used through your mobile device (phone, PDA, etc) - bridging the gap between the online and offline world. 2D barcode readers on your mobile phone ‘read” the barcode from a photograph taken by your camera phone (download a free reader application if you don't have one, check out Beetag or do a google search for alternative). You just take a picture of the 2D barcode and your mobile phone acquires and actions on the content of the 2D barcode. The content is usually a URL - take of photo of a 2D code and your mobile phone immediately displays the web site - but they can also return email addresses, business cards, etc. 2D barcodes can be placed on just about anything but you typically see them on products and in media such as billboards, newspapers, advertising, etc. Many companies are linking 2D barcodes to unique discounts, coupons and other incentives - just another great reason to give them a try.

snapizzi's 2D barcode, used in capturing photos from ANY camera, not just your camera phone.

The most common versions of 2D codes are QR Codes and Datamatrix - the latter is what snapizzi uses as it increases the accuracy in grouping and organizing photos. While you can use our datamatrix codes with your camera phone, snapizzi integrated and leveraged the 2D barcode technology to be used with ANY digital camera. We use the information stored in the 2D barcode to reference the images on our web platform. snapizzi’s use of 2D barcodes is truly innovative for high volume of portrait photography, especially school, sport and event photographers as our 2D barcodes automatically generate online private galleries ready for sale for each individual being photographed. This means no more sorting and organizing through thousands of school photos or assigning metadata to countless marathon pictures or capturing a myriad of contact information onsite at an event or party – no manual intervention needed.

If you want to learn more about the 2D barcodes, check out wikipedia (sited in above QR/Datamatrix links) or just give us a shout - we love to talk about what we do.