Here are a few ways that you can use QR codes to spruce up your small business marketing strategies.

On business cards: …
On marketing materials: …
In storefront windows: …
For freebies: …

Things to Remember
If you’re going to use QR codes for small business marketing, you’ll want to keep in mind that QR codes — and the apps that scan them — are still foreign to most people.

Yes, more and more people are starting to associate the codes with action, but never assume your customers will know what to do. Make it a point to spell out how to scan the QR code, and help instruct customers on where they can grab scanner apps.

Go read the whole thing – I’ve cut a lot there.

Mosaics of black-and-white squares, like tiny crossword puzzles, seem to have cropped up everywhere, from bus stop ads to newspapers to stickers on bananas.

The two-dimensional matrix codes are a way to encode information in print in a way that can be quickly scanned by a computer. The codes come in various forms, most of them using black and white squares, but some using hexagons or multi-coloured triangles.

One of the most popular is the QR Code, distinguished by the large squares in three of the code’s corners.

[...]

The most common use is to encode the address of a website in print so that cellphone users can quickly visit the site without typing in a complicated URL.

A QR Code used in this way becomes, in essence, a real-world hyperlink, a way to connect physical space to the virtual one. Tech giant Google has embraced the technology andFacebook has begun experimenting with using the codes as a way to link to user profiles.

The codes are especially popular in Japan where they’re often used in advertising — in magazines, on posters and even billboards — so consumers can learn more about a product or enter a contest. A movie poster might have a code that links to the movie’s trailer, for example. A for-sale sign on a house could link to its online listing.

Mail-order catalogues include codes for individual items, so customers can quickly order them through their phones. QR Codes on McDonald’s hamburger wrappers and soft drink cups link to nutritional information.

If you’re interested in QR Codes (and you probably should be), go read the whole thing.

Blogger asymco did a little calculating from last week’s announcement numbers, and has hammered out a rough estimate of just how many of each iDevice are floating around the world today. According to Steve at last week’s event, there are 120 million iDevices total in the world, and we already knew from SEC filings that 59.6 million of those were iPhones. The current number of iPads in the hands of customers around world is 3.2 million, which (with estimates for the past month on both of those devices added in), means that there are likely 45.2 million iPod touches around. That’s 37.7% of iOS devices at large — not as big as it used to be, as the iPad’s arrival shook things up a bit, but still a very significant total.

Your apps need to work without a network connection, or you’re missing almost 40% of the iOS handheld market.

If you go away on holiday this year, don’t end up like Calgary resident Jason Boutang. He used an application on his phone to translate phrases into French when he visited France last month. He also streamed a Calgary radio station for five hours.

The result? A cellphone bill of $7,763.70, according to [the] telecomblog.com. It’s easy to rack up huge roaming fees when you travel overseas because cellphone companies charge astronomical surcharges just to cross the border. But if you make a few preparations before you leave, you can keep your costs at a reasonable level.

“I recommend that if you go away and you want to use your phone, that you call your cell provider and get a travel package,” said Stephen Joyce, the CEO of the tourism technology company Rezgo.com.

Travel packages are a relatively new feature offered by cellphone companies. They charge different rates depending on the region. While the per-minute rate is still significantly higher than using your phone locally, it will offer travellers some savings. Otherwise, it could cost as much as $4 per minute for calls and $50 per megabyte for data usage, depending on where in the world you are. Text messages are also more expensive overseas, at about 60 cents per message.

Via story-mentioned @stephenjoyce and this topic has been previously covered here. Just as a general rule, even if you have a roaming package, don’t do streaming radio, watch videos and other bandwidth-intensive things on your smartphone unless you’re really sure you’re not going to be paying through the nose for it.

The latest AdMob numbers tell the story:

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US.

Given the trend lines, the Android’s probably in the #1 position by now and is likely to maintain it, at least until Apple introduces a version of the iPhone that’s not dependent on the somewhat flaky AT&T cellular network.

When will location-based services stop being fads and start getting real?

Sponsored by Wired, the talk featured panelists who all work on projects where users share information online, whether it be their location or answers posed by online users. And while gaming and social aspects have driven user rates to date, wider adoption dependson utility.

Chris Dixon, CEO and cofouner of Hunch, thinks it all comes down to Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma:

“One of the key characteristic of new disruptive technology is that it starts out looking like a toy. That’s so often why big companies ignore and dismiss it.”

But the big hurdle for start-ups is to get users play with and use their tools on a daily basis. Dixon divides people into two groups for these purposes: “techies” and “normals.” Many new digital tools are quickly adopted by techies, but “when it becomes critical infrastructure is when it crosses over to the normals,” he says.

With adoption of location-based tools, things are just getting started. The tipping point will be when people start depending on the store of information they provide on a daily basis.

Tony Jebara, associate professor of Computer Science at Columbia University & Chief Scientist at Sense Networks, puts it this way:

“When you’re in a new city, you have to start from scratch. And you realize how much better off you are with these tools.“

It’s exactly then, when services become personally useful, that people start saying “maybe my phone should be tracking me,” says Dennis Crowley, co-founder of mobile check-in service Foursquare.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

Demonstrating the intense fluctuations coming to Canada’s wireless industry in 2010, new research suggests the next six months will see 55 per cent of Canadians buying a new handset, likely a smart phone.

[...]

Of those who said they would buy a handset, 28 per cent wanted a touch-screen smart phone and 19 per cent wanted a Qwerty-keyboard, likely for easy texting, the study showed. Both of these growing habits – texting and data use – have gradually eroded the time spent talking on phones, analysts said, in part to the detriment of large wireless carriers.

Canadians are increasingly using smart phones and laptop data sticks to connect to the Web, according to data collected by Toronto’s Convergence Consulting Inc., which estimates 30 per cent of wireless subscribers will be using such devices by the end of 2010 and around 50 per cent by the start of 2014.

Emphasis by me. We believe they’re massively underestimating smartphone penetration by the start of 2014, as that’s 4 years away – forever in an industry where things get cheaper and better every quarter.

Via Alec Saunders.

Here’s an interesting report – Smartphone Owners Now Spending More from Handset, but Poor Site Functionality Is a Turn-off (all emphasis added by us):

Key findings from Compete’s Q3 2009 Smartphone Intelligence survey include:

• 37 percent of smartphone owners have purchased something non-mobile with their handset in the past 6 months.
• 19 percent of total smartphone owners have purchased music from their device, 14 percent have purchased books, DVDs, or video games and 12 percent have purchased movie tickets.
• The most popular mobile shopping-related activities are still research related – 41 percent of iPhone users and 43 percent of Android users are most likely to check sale prices at alternative locations from their mobile phones while they are shopping.
• The second most likely activity is accessing consumer reviews, with 39 percent of iPhone owners and 31 percent of Android owners investigating reviews from their handset before they purchase.

While m-commerce is poised for explosive growth in 2010, consumers are still more likely to abandon mobile purchasing on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, similar to shopping cart abandonment in the early days of e-commerce. Compete’s Q3 Smartphone Intelligence survey found that eight percent of smartphone owners that tried to purchase a product on their device were unable to do so. 45 percent of those that abandoned the process reported that they did so because the site would not load, and an additional 38 percent left the site because it was not developed specifically for smartphone users.

That is grim and probably totally unnecessary – purchasing products from your mobile tourism product should be as simple as buying music in iTunes. If you’re doing something interesting in this space, we’d like to hear from you.

Link via David Eads.