Son of CueCat? Purdue Professor Embeds Hyperlinks

rbook writes "Remember :CueCat, the "free" (as in beer) bar code scanner that was supposed to change everything by allowing advertisers (or whoever) to put hyperlinks in printed material? Well, the idea is back, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education: 'People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them. That's the idea behind Sorin Matei's project, Ubimark, which embeds books with two-dimensional codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed.' Photographing an image and uploading it sounds like more trouble than scanning a bar code to follow a URL, but they figure you can take the photograph with your smartphone and view the web page automatically on the mobile device." It looks like standard QR codes are embedded; what Ubimark is pushing is "a publishing environment which combines print books, ubilinks, a centralized Internet based interactive information repository and computer displays."

Re:Bar none

[mspohr]

... or something like the BarCode Scanner application for Android which uses the camera to read 1d and 2d barcodes and takes you to the web page/ download/ web search/etc. This is really easy to use. Just point it at the barcode and it figures out what to do.

Ubimark answers...

[ubimark]

Great comments everyone, even if you are skeptical. A couple of comments. You can join Ubimark by simply commenting on our site. Comments will appear on the chapter web pages and will be available to anyone who scans the upper left corner codes. 2D codes are generated on the fly by the site. Users need not worry about this. 2d codes are a convenient, mature, existing tool that works well with the cell phones we carry in our pockets right now. OCR on the fly or other more sophisticated approaches would need to wait for the next generation of cell phones. Cuecats died because they required dedicated hardware. No need to buy anything here. Simply enjoy your book. Paper is better for reading books. For now, at least. Finally, my grandfather, a farmer with a knack for storytelling and making great plum brandy left me as family heirloom this story. There was a time when people had no knowledge of hangers. Clothes would get dumped on the ground. One day, a fellow drove a nail into a wall and hung his coat from it. The entire village came to see the 8th wonder of the world. After much discussion and debate the village blacksmith came to our fellow and told him: "Lad, to tell you honest, I could have made a better nail than yours, one with a hook! You know what, though? I never thought of it!" This is a conceptual project before anything else, so feel free to comment and interact with us either here or at http://ubimark.com/ [ubimark.com] . You can also follow us on twitter @ithinkblog