Driving Interactive Mobility with Microsoft Tag
If you work with documents, images, blogs, or other digital information, you are probably familiar with tagging. Keywords, or meta data, can be used to describe the information in question (a file, unstructured data, etc) which later helps indexing and searching. The following is a slightly different take on tagging that promises to foster new experiences in interactive mobility. By using coded images (think barcodes) and a small app in a camera-equipped smartphone, users can interact directly with their environment, in real-time, to receive new information, or find new experiences, through their device.
As the FAQ states, anything from billboards, to product packages, to business cards, can be equipped with such an image. As a simple use case, imagine reading a tag on someone's business card, then being shown - on your device - a small videocast describing that person's business. Or perhaps someone who is visually impaired can tag a product to 'hear' a description rather than having to read a small font on a box. The scenario's are endless...I see tremendous potential from a marketing, usability, and even transaction processing perspective. As it concerns interoperability, I see great value in the fact that we are simplifying the transaction between the device and surrounding infrastructure through a discrete and 'simple-to-deploy' component pair. The software is available for most devices today and the tags will be deployed in various media by anyone who wants to use them. The tags won't care what 'reads them' and the devices won't care what produces the tag (screen, paper, etc).
The Tag service is in beta today. For more information, check out the website here: http://www.microsoft.com/tag. If you want to try it out, by the way, visit the site to grab the app. I've created a test tag here that loads my personal blog into your mobile web browser...
