My Nokia E71 has a 2D barcode reader in it. it uses the built in camera to scan and interpret the barcodes. I was wondering what it would be useful for. Nokia has a barcode generation site which lets you encode URL, text or business card information and generate a barcode. One can use the site to generate barcodes and display on the site. The above barcode was generated using this site and contains the URL for this blog. Probably not very useful. But where I think this would be useful is for mobile download sites.

Lets say I am at a mobile themes download site and quickly want to download a theme. If the site provides such a barcode for downloading the app, I can point the camera to it, get the URL on my phone and download the theme. This could also be used in print magazines, newspapers and bilboards for URLs or contact informations.

At the moment not a lot of sites provide this barcode. But as always there is some enterprising Firefox developer around to develop an extension. Checkout Mobile Barcoder. This extension generates 2D barcodes (called QR Codes) of the URL of
the current page being viewed. You can then use a mobile phone to read
the URL from the screen to save you typing the long URL using the phone
keypad. Cool.