Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Semapedia
Semapedia.org describes itself as "the physical wiki." The basic idea
is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the best information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.
We do this by combining the physical annotation technology of Semacode with high quality information from Wikipedia.
Most simply, the Semapedia system generates 2D barcodes that can be linked to Wikipedia articles (and maybe any other Web page? not sure). When you point a camera cell phone at the code, you can call up the article. Here's more:
The significance of Semacode is that one can now link a real world, physical object to arbitrary data. Before there has been no link, except for things like ordinary barcodes such as those used in stores to label products, or on books to indicate publication details. Unlike Semacodes, traditional barcodes have limited storage for information, are fixed function and good for only one narrow application, and also require the use of special, custom hardware and software to read or access such barcodes.
With the Semacode approach, all it now takes is for an ordinary camera phone, equipped with a Semacode reader software package (available free of charge by pointing your mobile phone web browser to the ‘over the air’ distribution). There is no need to purchase any hardware or software to read these two dimensional barcodes.
Semacodes, by embedding a URL into a barcode, enable any portion of the Internet to be ‘attached’ to any object, and can replace barcodes by going further to give arbitrary information on the Internet, not just the simple product number.
Naturally, are pictures of semapedia in action on flickr, and a flickr semapedia cluster.
There are a growing number of little systems that consist of stickers/tags/barcodes + back end with some content + delivery of said content to mobile device. All pushing to make it easier to access digital information in physical places-- easier both in technical terms, and in terms of lowering the amount of work or distraction required. What's a general name for these things? Is there one yet?