If you have so many years in software development like me, you probably remember that, for a few months, at middle 80s I guess, software development maganizes began to include a printed long vertical rectangle with little squares, at the margin of an article’s page. In that way, the authors published source code: that image could be scanned and transformed to text files. It was a great idea, that it was forgotten after the distribution of diskettes (and years after, CDs, DVDs) in the software magazine issue.
This year 2009, Microsoft launched an IPhone application, with an wide set of uses: Microsoft Pad
One idea: every object, post package, mechandise, traveling stuff, could be coded with this tag, pointing to an URL with a REST/Web Service interface, where we can update the state/position of the object, using a simple app in our mobile devices. The endpoint could describe itself, the available operations to perform on object status. Each physical object could have an updatable state in the cloud, pointed by its own tag drawing.
My first contact with this tech, was via a twitter from @MartinSalias (another use of twitter: quick and light way of getting interesing news, it could replace the RSS readers of hundreds of blogs). These days, Arvindra Sehmi published a blog post:
Microsoft Tag – Snap. Blink. Wow!
More general info at Microsoft Tag home page:
To make tags go:
and go to gettag.mobi to download the scanning application.
Other posts:
Microsoft Releases Tag, Its Second iPhone Application
Another Useless iPhone App From Microsoft- ‘Tag’ (MSFT)
Microsoft Joins the Physical World Connections and Interactions Space with Microsoft Tag
Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en
http://twitter.com/ajlopez
Angel \"Java\" Lopez on Blog 