tag-reader
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Viral Crackdown 2 contest offers early demo access
This is your lucky day, agent. Today you get to participate in viral marketing, easily the best kind of marketing in Pacific City. This marketing, as you may have guessed, is for Crackdown 2. You might be wondering why you'd participate in such a thing. After all, you loved the first Crackdown, you've read the hands-on coverage for the sequel, your pre-order money has been set aside and you're just coasting your way to July. The answer is simple: early demo access. To get started, pick up Microsoft's Tag Reader app for your mobile phone (find it at gettag.mobi). Then, watch this video. At the end you'll see a hidden orb, which you can scan with Tag Reader. If you'd rather not watch the video (again), you can just scan the image to the right. Once scanned, you can register for a contest account, which will provide you with text message clues about the locations of the remaining "orbs." Find them, scan them and you're in. Orbs for demos, agent. Orbs for demos. Unless you don't have a texting plan, of course.
Tag: Microsoft's first Android app is it
Everybody loves a world's first. So we might as well mention that Microsoft just released its very first application written for Google's competitive Android smartphone platform: Microsoft Tag Reader. Tag, as you might recall, is Microsoft's pseudo QR code implementation that uses high capacity color "barcodes" to link back to content. Download the app from the Android Market, scan a Tag with any camera enabled Android phone, and the linked data will automatically load on your device, be it a web page, video, advertisement, coupon, etc. Of course, readers without tags are as useless as tags without a wide swath of people with devices to read them -- so really, Microsoft has no choice but develop its Tag apps (already available for WinMo, Symbian, Blackberry, and iPhone handsets) for as many platforms as possible. First!
Microsoft offers second app for iPhone
After the impressive release of Seadragon for the iPhone/ iPod touch, Microsoft has followed up by releasing an iPhone version of Tag Reader. [App Store link] Tag Reader allows you to use your iPhone to grab a quick photograph of a colorful icon that contains lots of digital tagging. It could be a web site, product information, even your contact details from a vCard or even free text.First, download Tag Reader from the App Store and install it on your iPhone. Then, test it against some samples on the Microsoft Tag web page. Next, if you like, you can create your own tags. You'll need a Microsoft Live ID, but those are free. I tried creating one for our TUAW website and it came back as blacklisted (#$&!!). Is it something we said?I tried again, this time creating a tag for the Apple web page. That seemed to work. You can try it on the icon at the bottom of this post. Just make sure the tag fills about half the frame of the camera image. Snap your photo, then follow the instructions in the app.I'm not sure if this will ever catch on. You can put one of these tags on your business card, or on a product box, or even on your own web site. As you've seen if you tried my example, you can capture the tag from a monitor. At some point, Microsoft expects to charge for the creation of these tags, but for now, it's all free. For this to work, a lot of people will have to participate, and it could be the cure for which there was no disease. Still, it is nice to see Microsoft recognize that the iPhone is a force in the world and if they want to deploy mobile technology they have to take the millions of iPhone/ iPod touch users into account.
