WebNerd Alert: ScanLife

The other day I was looking into DataMatrix 2D barcodes for a client. She was interested in learning more about these barcodes and how they're used. I've seen them in magazines and on fliers and they struck me as the same technology that BlackBerry uses to add BBM Messenger contacts by scanning their barcode.

After a bit of web research I found out: 1) how to create/encode these barcodes and 2) how to use your mobile phone to read them. That's where ScanLife comes in. ScanLife is an application that's available for just about all "recent" mobile phones. ScanLife allows you to scan these 2D barcodes to determine what's encoded in them. These barcodes can be used to encode lots of different information and pretty soon you're going to start seeing them in more and more places and you'll be able to use your phone to scan them and be taken to websites, be sent a text message automatically, or just read a message that's encoded in the bar code. This will probably be a heavily-used promotional tool for lots of companies that do ads in print publications.

To download ScanLife you can visit the following URL: http://www.scanlife.com/atlantis/appdownload.html

At the above URL you'll see that the application is available for a variety of phones and in most cases all you've got to do is use your phone's mobile browser to visit a website and download the application. Trust me when I say that you may as well go ahead and download this application now, WHILE IT'S FREE, because once these barcodes start popping up any and everywhere, I'd bet that this app won't be free any longer.

For a little more on how ScanLife works, check the video below: