At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft unveiled a new beta product called Tag. It's a simple technology on the surface, but it holds enormous potential for creative use at retail.

Tag is an extension of the company's existing High Capacity Colour Barcode (HCCB) technology, packaged for extreme ease of use and simple integration with mobile devices. Each Tag consists of a 5x10 grid of triangles, each of which can be in one of four colors. This allows a tag to hold 13 bytes of data, more than enough to store a URL or a phone number.

After installing the Tag client application, a user simply captures an image of a Tag with the mobile phone. Depending on how the Tag is configured, snapping that picture might cause a Web page to load, a video to play, a document to download or a call to a number to be placed.

So what about some Environmental uses of Tag. I invite you all to post your ideas.

Obvious one that comes to mind is for Product Labelling to provide detailed Environmental data such as embodied CO2, food miles, ethical sourcing etc.

Here are  Five ways retailers can use Microsoft Tag today to give you some ideas…..

PS: the tag at the head of this post really is my vCard. Try downloading the app and snapping it.