Many people tend to get bent out of shape every time Facebook changes anything. I’m wasn’t in that camp until Facebook Timeline hit. As a Web developer, I appreciate that Facebook successfully manages a community with more than 800 million users, which offers them a bit of forgiveness for little interface issues. Beyond that, I bet if the people complaining about new interfaces went back three months later, they wouldn’t even recognize the old one and would agree that things had, in fact, improved.

As a Web-savvy individual, I don’t have any great love for Facebook’s approach to privacy settings. I find them cumbersome and imagine a lot of users don’t take the time to navigate, therefore leaving their accounts wide open for perusing. I periodically check on my settings to make sure everything looks good, even logging out and Googling myself to see what other people see.

I was therefore rather shocked to discover that when I upgraded to Timeline, Facebook automatically changed the privacy settings on all my photos to make them viewable by all Facebook users without notifying me. In fact, it wasn’t until a non-friend (who soon became my friend) told me that she liked my Burning Man photos that I became aware that all my photos were being shared with all 800 million of my closest friends.

The fact that managing privacy on Facebook feels a little like managing a database is one reason apps like Foursquare are so popular. Not only did Foursquare create a superior culture and interface for checking in to your favorite places, they steered around the Facebook privacy settings issue by making it easy for you to collect your privacy settings under a separate app rather than digging through Facebook. In other words, when you launch Foursquare you aren’t connected to anyone until you add them, so it’s much easier to know exactly who has access to the information you share through that app.

I think we’ll find this approach of organizing information and privacy under a brand name will become more common in the future, making it easier for people to associate apps, communities, and privacy settings with a brand rather than as one of numerous settings in your Facebook account.

Here are a few tips for managing Facebook privacy:

1) Make sure your profile isn’t open to everyone (even non-Facebook users) by confirming your Default Privacy setting for new posts. Click on the arrow in the top right corner

Then choose the option you want, most likely “Friends.”

2) Make sure your past posts, photos and any other sensitive information are not available to all Facebook users. This was the main problem in my case, since all my old photos were made available without my knowledge. On the same page, find this option and click “Manage Past Post Visibility.”

Click “Limit Old Posts” when you see this:

And finally click “Confirm” when you see this screen to limit all past posts to be viewed only by your friends:

3) Facebook has created little tools all over the place to make it easier for you to share something with friends or other specific groups. In the example below, this posting will be shown to Friends by default, but I can easily change that by clicking “Friends” and selecting another group or list.

Good luck and let me know if you have any other privacy tips!

This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Social Media, Technology, Web

When I was in high school, one of my favorite classes was Photography. I took photos using a manual SLR (Single Lens Reflex), and I developed my film manually in the school’s dark room (I smelled of vinegar quite frequently). It was a wonderful process, and I still have several of my prints framed. One of the main appreciations I had regarding photography was that out of three rolls of film, you were lucky to have two images turn out well. The reasoning was because of the way the film developed (involving almost half an hour of mixing components in a canister by hand) along with efforts in the dark room. For example, if you left the developer light on a mere 1/2 second longer, it could change the entirety of your photo. It took time and a whole lot of patience.

Our last class assignment involved digital photography. We “elitist art students” of course balked at the notion. However after taking a series of photos for the assignment and then editing via computer I realized that the process took a mere 15-20 minutes of editing! Hours in the dark room decreased to less than one. A miracle!

I was honored to have received our school’s Leadership Award in art for my efforts in Photography class, but upon leaving the ceremony (and graduation), I haven’t once touched my SLR. I have converted to my Canon digital SLR and my iPhone. And I admit, I use my iPhone more. A lot has changed since high school, especially with photography. While we once fiddled with manual f-stop settings, now we apply a filter via Instagram or edit using iPhoto, and you’re all set to go.

It’s so much easier, yes. However I admit there are times that I feel I should take out my old SLR and try to go back to the process I once found so rewarding and meditative. It’s at least good to appreciate the effort and the evolution of photography as both a skill and hobby. And I can tell you, I definitely look at my framed film photos with a lot more appreciation than my hundreds of digital shots.

You can say the same about the evolution of the printing press, the typewriter, and even the Atari. Technology changes and evolves, and I’m usually right behind it. But I still hold onto that SLR camera. You never know – one day my iPhone may break.

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Gadget, Technology

Tumblr is a popular blog platform that many people are turning to. It’s simple to set up. Easy to use and is completely free. So is Tumblr the right blog for your business?

Let’s first look at what Tumblr is good at.

Simple to set up.

Go to tumblr.com and enter your name, email address and password. Presto! You have a Tumblr blog. Of course you can customize the look and layout of your blog, and at very least, add a photo, but you can start using right away.

Easy to use.

Tumblr offers 7 different types of content to blog. Text, Photos, Video, Quotes, Audio, Links and Chat.

Once you select the type of content you want to blog, you enter and/or upload the information, select when you want to post and add any tags or links you want to include. Your blog post is created. It’s that easy! No HTML knowledge is required.

Is Tumblr the right blog for your business?

One of the benefits of a Tumblr blog, in addition to its ease of use, is the Tumblr community. You can follow other blogs, re-blog their posts and comment on others’ posts. As you should with any marketing effort, you should know the audience you are trying to reach. These stats from May of 2011 should give you an idea if you may find your audience on Tumblr.

Also, do a quick search for keywords your business would show up for. Are there any results? If not Tumblr may not be for you. But if so, you may have just found a built-in audience on a very easy to use and visually pleasing platform.

What do you think? Do you have a Tumblr blog? Leave a link in the comments so we can see some examples!

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Tim McDonald Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, General, Social Media, Web

When we talk blogging, we usually focus on the platform. Should I do WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous or even TypePad? So you get set up on the blog platform, you have your URL, you may have a hosting provider, but then what? Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to discuss with you the nuts and blots of the blog.

First off, to have a blog, you must know what you want to write about. I’m sure you’ve already done so because you have a URL set up. But yet when you sit down and want to start writing about how great your business is and why everyone should hire you, I’m sure you may encounter a bit of writer’s block.

The Editorial Calendar

You don’t have to have a “hard core” editorial calendar with every single blog post you plan to publish through the rest of the year. However, you at least should have a calendar somewhere (be it in Google, Outlook, or even a big tear-sheet calendar above your desk). This calendar should have themes. That’s right, themes. Each week you should write content focusing on a general topic or subject matter. In fact, take inspiration from your monthly newsletter or other publications you may have in-house. Have that editorial calendar influence your own; that way you can mention content that you’ve previously written to support your new content – thereby this also promotes your existing content. That’s always a winner! With these themes in play, write a blog post every Friday or Saturday “wrapping up” the week with a round-up of blog posts and online articles supporting that theme that include both your own blog’s and other’s content. This is fantastic for generating link-backs within your own site (great for SEO) and for providing a very strong round-up of content for your readership.

The Set-Up

Whatever blog platform you are on, most have Categories. Come up with five (and no more than five unless you absolutely need more than five) categories that focus on not just what content you are delivering, but also that are broad enough to fit in multiple topics. The more categories, the more confusing your blog is to navigate. As the K.I.S.S. acronym goes, “Keep It Simple Stupid”.

This also goes for plug-ins. The plug-in is mostly used with WordPress as this platform is very much viewed as a basic template with lots of nifty plug-ins available for you to tap into to make your blog just that much more awesome. There are a few plug-ins I definitely recommend. Here are a few for WordPress that I recommend using (please share your other favorites in the comments!):

• Akismet: Spam be gone! This plug-in helps get rid of all of those annoying spam bots commenting on your site.
• Feedburner: You know when you click on the RSS feed logo, you either see a nice set-up where you can choose which RSS reader you wish to read the feed through or you see a bunch of gobbledygook? Feedburner makes sure you get the nice set-up.
• Google XML Sitemaps: This creates a special XML sitemap that helps search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to better index your blog
• LinkWithin or Outbrain: Both of these show related posts at the end of each of your blog post from within your own site to promote people staying on your blog and to continue reading. Outbrain usually has one sponsored post that leads away from your site – but if you garner enough traffic you can reap the affiliate benefits from that!
• Livefyre: Finding the best commenting plug-in is a difficult one. Many people prefer Disqus, but I’m a Livefyre go for its functionality to bring in tweets and Facebook posts automatically as comments so people reading the blog can see people’s reactions from across multiple social channels.
• Platinum SEO Pack: This really kicks butt in optimizing your blog for SEO. Period.
• ShareThis: Definitely add this so people can share your content within your own interface without leaving your blog.
• Tweet Old Post: I love this plug-in in helping me tweet out past content that I don’t have time to manually go back and tweet out. It’s customizable and oh so very helpful.

Internal Searching

When you search on Google, you keep your searches pretty straight-forward right? Of course you do unless you are just genuinely curious on what happens if you type in a ridiculous search such as “ostrich roundabout popsicles” (and yes I did Google that after I typed it – pretty funny results!). But seriously, if you want to find out information on optimizing your website for search engines, you probably will Google something like, “SEO website optimization how-to”. You need to make sure your blog provides reliable search results for those searching within it. You can do this by trying to match these keywords and phrases within your title, content, tags and meta descriptions. (The meta description is the phrase that pops up underneath your blog title when it pops up in search engines and within your own blog search results. They are limited to 160 characters so be brief, otherwise you and others will see a “…” at the end of it.) By making sure your content is searchable, the titles may not be as fun, but they definitely will be effective.

The SEO Factor

This one has a few sub-bullet points under it, but let’s focus on the basics. I mentioned meta descriptions before and the few SEO plug-ins mentioned above really help with this, but just be aware of SEO with keywords, linking back to your own content, meta descriptions, tags, and what I feel is most important, not duplicating content! It is not good having your blog copied and pasted in its entirety onto another blog. Google flags that, calls it bad, and can shut your site down. Blogging can be a mad, mad world, so keep it content-focused on good quality and being original.

I could go on and on when it comes to blog set-up and maintenance, but these few steps can hopefully help get you started! Any questions or things to add? Please comment below and I’ll see what I can do to answer your questions!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Social Media

I have been fascinated with technology my entire life. From my first computer consulting gig in the second grade to now running Astek, I have been constantly fascinated by technology’s potential to empower, democratize, inspire, motivate, revolutionize, and capitalize every industry and individual it touches. I’ve been equally interested in the tendency for technology’s infancy state to disrupt before it does any of those positive things.

And even as I write this I find myself describing technology as “doing” these things, but of course technology is simply a tool, capable of nothing without human intervention. That’s how we tend to talk about technology, as though it has a mind of its own.

As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” When technology is new, people often indeed view it as magic because their understanding of the mechanics is so limited. This naive state is important, because it tells us how people use the technology perhaps without understanding the way it was designed to be used. This can lead to accidental innovation in the form of byproducts or creative usage.

My favorite contemporary view comes from author Clay Shirky, who said, “Curiously, once the technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.”

I agree with Shirky that only when technology becomes ubiquitous do we favor talking about the social benefits that integrated technology delivers rather than the features that make us geek out. Only then do the most interesting non-technological social effects of a technology begin to emerge.

Twitter is a perfect example of possibility+conflict in my life. The mechanical ideology of Twitter is incredibly simple compared to other social or information networks. But clearly it is no trivial task to keep all those billions of tweets going.

As someone who has been on Twitter for more than four years and has yet to send 1,000 tweets, my mantra has remained consistent: I speak when I have something to say. I find Twitter to be a highly disruptive medium as I’d typically rather be talking with someone face to face than online under any circumstances.

Yet at the same time, I love the wide-spread potential for Twitter and I see it becoming more refined and less disruptive. Twitter’s own iPhone app was historically at the bottom of the list of Twitter apps until version 4.0. To me, this one changed everything. They really finally figured out how to make it easy to spend five minutes on Twitter and get the most value out of it rather than previous apps which we much more focused on cramming features in than streamlining one’s Twitter life.

One of the greatest disruptions of mobile technology is the flaky nature of Internet connections. The U.S. suffers behind some third world countries since we still have to maintain so much copper infrastructure. There are some creative solutions out there to boost reception, but until this “just works” it will continue to disrupt by making people stare at their phones for a minute or more waiting for tasks that should have taken a few seconds to process.

The social network I most actively participate with is Foursquare, where the basic action of “checking in” to a place should just take a few seconds. However, given the realities of mobile Internet reliability and my lack of desire to paint an antenna on a tree wherever I am, Foursquare does indeed end up disrupting my life, especially my meals, more than I’d like. It’s worth exploring, but we have a long way to go before everyone is on board.

I’m always enchanted to meet someone who is not yet on Facebook or has yet to delve into one the other daily social phenomenons. People the geeks may view as luddites who haven’t yet seen the light to me represent a sort of purity that makes me wonder if they are still appreciating parts of life that the digital haze has diffused for the rest of us. We’re going through something necessary for humanity’s progress, where increased connectivity will solve big world problems. But the current value of it all currently leaves room for doubt.

Perhaps Einstein got it right in 1941 with a bit more brutal view of the impact of technology, saying, “Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Mobile, Technology

2011 was an amazing year of learning and growing at Astek. In our industry things change pretty much daily, even hourly. We are lucky to work with so many forward-thinking clients and partners who understand that building real success in this market takes time, discipline, and communication. Oh yeah, and we think life’s too short not to have a little fun along the way.

Early in the year, Rachel and I attended SXSW Interactive, a top-tier conference for all things Web, mobile and social in Austin, TX. One of our top goals was to find the ideal social media management/monitoring/analytics platform with enterprise capabilities and agency pricing. We’ve met some talented people along the way with some pretty cool products, but there is a lot of room for growth in this space. We’ll be rolling out a new social media event product of our own in the coming weeks — stay tuned!

Supporting an ongoing effort to get more social at Astek, we started video recording the strange and mystical things that happen at Astek staff meetings. Here’s a glimpse:

In June, we kicked our relationship with SIPA up a notch and have worked since then to increase their social media efforts. It’s greatly rewarding to work with a group that understands social media are about creating relationships, and just like relationships in the “real world,” there is no easy button or shortcut.

Who is SIPA, you may ask? SIPA, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, is the international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of commercial information providers (paid content) serving niche communities. These are primarily B2B trade journals, but members also include consumer-oriented Kiplinger and publishers serving other markets. There are numerous SIPs (specialized information publishers) out there serving all kinds of niche community information needs, whether or not they identify themselves with this group.

We’ve been SIPA members for years, teaching and learning along with top publishing talent, and in June we started managing social media for SIPA’s annual publishing conference in Washington, D.C. We applied what we learned at SXSW and other places along the way, creating a robust social media event experience. More recently, it seems like a dream that I was swimming in the Atlantic just a few short weeks ago following the SIPA Miami Publishing Marketing Conference, where we had four Astek team members speaking, learning, and helping.

At the Miami conference last year, I led a roundtable discussion on mobile publishing and met a publisher called The Medical Letter, who needed help building mobile apps on all major platforms (iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry). We worked diligently with them and our friends at FanWide to create cutting edge publishing apps and successfully launched the iPhone/iPad and Android versions. In the spirit of mutual learning and sharing, my client and I presented a webinar hosted by SIPA to inform other publishers about how to step into the mobile space.

In the four years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve seen it grow from an esoteric geek-oriented communication platform to a widely adopted and ubiquitous brand imprint on websites everywhere. Yet many people I talk to still question its worth for driving revenue. As we’ve embraced Twitter as the ideal communication platform for events and conferences, I’ve noticed that finally people are able to grasp the potential for this simple, yet powerful medium for enhancing communication at an event and also bridging the communication gap between cyclical events in ways not before seen at this scale.

As we continue to connect the dots for publishers and other event promoters, we continue our decade-long focus on content management solutions facilitating the digital publishing revolution. Astek’s own CMS, Webany, is ideally suited for the Web-first editorial trend that continues to gain momentum. Basically, rather than thinking about getting your print publication onto the Web, publish in real-time on the Web and build your print publication from there.

We’re so excited that our lady, Webany, is growing up right in the middle of the dramatic shifts in the publishing industry, and is flexible enough to handle them. Haven’t been introduced yet? Just ask. We’d love to show you some of her newest features including robust digital rights management and the ability to export articles and other information directly to Adobe InDesign, the preeminent desktop publishing platform, via XML.

Reversing a publisher’s workflow is not a task to be taken lightly, so we lend our expertise to the process in addition to the technology, which is a combination that’s future-proofing editorial teams around the globe. As publishers figure out the moves that work for them along the way, we enjoy learning and teaching as we go. 2011 brought many clients to Webany, including Wiley Publishing, The Alter Group and Staff Management.

Contributing to our community is a core mission at Astek, so recently we were proud to launch a new brand and website for Promethean Theatre Ensemble, our 2011 Astek Grant recipient. Along the way, we greatly expanded the digital marketing program for The Chicago Dancing Festival and got new websites launched for The Jeanine Sheridan Foundation, DanceWorks Chicago and Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) as well. Yep, we like to move.

And last but not least is a particularly rewarding combination of app dev and do-gooding. This multi-year project with My25, which is partially funded by the USDA, has engaged Astek to help tackle the growing obesity epidemic in America. My25’s approach is to use software and community tools to encourage better eating through realistic meal-planning based on simple and proven plate portioning techniques. We designed a prototype for the next generation of the software and created this video to help with fund-raising (yes, we spent more time on this than the staff meeting video).

Thanks for being a part of our ongoing exploration and we look forward to connecting you with your goals in 2012!

 This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

Like so many other people out there, I subscribe to probably 100 more RSS feeds than I need to. However, I just love the idea that everything I may or may not be interested in is at least is one place. It stands for “Real Simple Syndication” for  a reason right? Unfortunately, sometimes organizing can lead more towards organized chaos versus simplicity. Therefore earlier this year I decided to make a commitment to not only organize my RSS feeds, but to do so through apps that made reading them not only enjoyable, but simple!

So I started with my MacBook. I admit I mostly use my RSS reader on my Mac to find relevant articles on specific topics for either our company or for clients. With that being said, I think NetNewsWire is quite literally, the bomb. You can download it to your computer and it synchronizes with your reader (in my case, I synch it with Google Reader).

The selling feature to me is the Smart List functionality. It’s a similar set-up to iTunes, in which you can create Smart Lists with keywords and phrases that automatically gather in these folders to show all the content in your feeds that contain these keywords. It’s perfect for finding those articles mentioning B2B news or highlighting competition mentions. And don’t worry PC users, you can use FeedDemon similarly with tags versus smart lists for finding those keywords.

The other feature I like about NetNewsWire is that it synchs with Instapaper. So if I’m reading something interesting, and I want to save it to tweet about later, write a blog post about, or actually finish reading the article, it’s a click of a button and POOF! It’s saved in my Instapaper feed. And yes, I do have many-a folder in my Instapaper account with titles such as “Facebook Posts”, “Tweets”, “Newsletter Links”, etc. for both Astek and clients. That way I don’t have to worry about a back-log of links in my Instapaper account. But that’s a whole other blog post.

Now, to my iPad. Personally, I am a newspaper kind of girl. I have a degree in Journalism, and there’s something about reading a real newspaper…you know, one with ink. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a digital subscription to the New York Times (I do). It does mean that I scoured the App Store for an RSS reader that made reading my RSS feeds an actually pleasant experience. Lo and behold, Early Edition. Now, no matter how many RSS feeds I have, they will always look pretty on my reader. Just add a cup of coffee and it’s almost as Sunday-morning-esque as a real newspaper.

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Technology

I owe a lot to Steve Jobs. My family got an Apple IIc computer when I was in the 1st grade (thanks Mom and Dad!) and it defined my entire career. I was an early card-carrying member of the cult of Apple. It wasn’t just about being cool or different. There are hundreds of tangible reasons why that platform was and is superior. Not just for artists, but for everyone. An evangelist was born.

In the 2nd grade, my 1st grade teacher came to get me out of class to help her “fix” her Apple IIe. Remember those guys with the green and black monitors? Turns out she just didn’t have the monitor on, but I found it remarkable that she came to me rather than any other adult in the school.

That was my first consulting gig.

I often don’t write about “big news” since I figure everyone is doing it and the world probably doesn’t need one more blog post. But in this case, this isn’t just news. This is the end of an era.

But it’s not all sadness. Steve’s legacy is so strong, inspiring, and lasting that his untimely passing also marks the beginning of a new era — for Apple and all technology companies and geeks.

We’ve seen social media take hold in the past few years, and I believe we have yet to realize the true potential of that technology. In its infant state of exploration, experimentation and fundamental learning, social media remain anyone’s game.

Apple fueled the growth of new technologies such as social media by exploding the potential of open mobile app distribution. I clamor to ideas like this — philosophies, frameworks, and factories working together to empower everyone and level the playing field.

At the center of all this was Steve, whose singular vision and demanding standards merged artistry and technology into some of the most empowering devices and software ever created.

Being a life-long Apple fanatic means I’ve been there in good times and bad. I saw Steve get booted from Apple, and then triumphantly return to save the company from disappearing altogether. I painfully tried to help my college buddies with their late-90’s Mac’s that just weren’t very well-built.

When the Mac came about in 1984, I became mesmerized by desktop publishing and later PageMaker. The Mac made that world possible at the time, and once again I found it easy to dazzle people by doing what I enjoyed most – using the things that came out of Steve’s mind to solve problems and create.

This lead me to pursue journalism through high school and college. I was also an Apple Student Rep at Northwestern, which is the only time I received a paycheck from Apple. While I didn’t specifically pursue journalism as a career, my life has led me along the path of the new journalism in the form of social media and communication technologies. I apply these lessons on behalf of my company and clients every day.

And yes, I still use a Mac. Now I have several. I feel like much of the world has come to understand what I’ve known all my life. Vision like this is rare and deserves to be revered.

Steve would be the first to tell you that his path was not without mistakes. Whose life isn’t? But his journey is an extraordinary one worthy of reflection. He had a unique way of bringing teams of varied talent together to create something profound around a singular vision. It’s no surprise that Pixar is one of most successful film studios and business success stories in any industry.

Five years ago, who would have thought that thousands of executives would be walking around with an Apple logo on their phones?

If you’ve never seen it, take a few minutes to watch Steve Jobs’ address to Stanford graduates in 2005. These words continue to inspire me.

Thanks Steve for all you’ve given me and the world. We’ll never forget what you did and we’ll do our very best to carry your torch of innovation.

Update:
I was going through some old Apple memorabilia (yes, I have a lot of it), and found this photo of the rock we painted at Northwestern University in April 1997 before they changed to a single color logo. We made the student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, the next day. However, the article was titled “Macintosh Misery” due to our decision to create hopeful art during a dark chapter in Apple’s life. Steve’s return and recovery of the company shortly thereafter thankfully make these mere anecdotes of history.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Gadget, Technology

Wow…. just wow. Well, and ouch. And, HECK YEAH!

Ok, who wants one?

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Katie Hawkey Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, Technology, Web

Office Blogmaster: “Sara- this month we’re focusing on QR codes, so make sure you include them in your next blog post”

Me: “Um, what’s a QR Code?”

That’s right.  I, Sara Gorsky, am the only person in the world apparently who doesn’t know what a QR code is.  It’s shocking.  However, thanks to this marvelous thing called the “internet” I was able to discover a whole new world of technology that I was looking at the whole time but could never see.  Just in case some other people out there are in the same boat as me, here is what I have learned…

What is a QR Code? In simplest terms, a QR Code is INFORMATION!   It could be any kind of information, and it’s in the form of a sort of modern bar code.

How can I access this “information”? QR codes are designed to be read by mobile devices with a camera.  In order to do this, you will have to download an app designed specifically for this purpose. There are a plethora of free apps out there that do this. I simply went to the app store on my iPhone did a search for “QR Reader” and up popped a free app called “QRReader“, which took a mere five seconds to install.  Once you have this app installed, open it up and scan the QR Code.  The app will read it and translate it into english and/or action.

Action? The most common information contained in a QR Code is a link to a website. For instance, a QR code on a movie advertisement might link directly to the official website for that film.

Might? Well, as I said before the QR Code could be any information.  That same movie poster QR Code could link to a special trailer that can only be viewed by people who scan it, or maybe a coupon for discounted movie tickets.

Coupons?! Yup.  More and more companies are using QR codes in this way.  As smart phone platforms expand, QR Codes could become the next circulars.  Some grocery stores are already swapping out those old coupon dispensers for a cleaner, more eco-friendly QR code (grocery stores have also starting posting recipes next to items.  How convenient!).

How Else are QR Codes Being Used? There is a new use for QR codes almost every day. Here are a few super cool ways they have been used so far…

• Tours and Museums: Historical tours, factory tours, museum tours, you name it- they are adding QR codes next to buildings, objects, artwork, display cases, etc…these QR Codes often will pull up a paragraph or two about the specific object and/or links to a webpage with this information.  Some of these codes even link directly to a wikipedia page, or a video of a historian discussing it’s significance. Soon those giant placards will be a thing of the past, too.
• In gardens: QR Codes have started popping up at gardens and often contain the detail about that specific plant. QR codes have also started showing up at nurseries, where they contain information about how to care for the plant (how much sunlight & water it needs, what time of year it blooms, etc…).
• On tags: Clothing designers have started using QR codes on their tags.  These QR codes often contain price, material type, and sometimes links to the designer’s website or online store. Social media gurus predict that soon we’ll be able to use QR codes to check if that piece comes in a different size!  AMAZING!
• At transit stops: A few cities have started posting QR codes at bus and train stops which will automatically pull up the next arrival time.
• In advertisements: These codes often contain coupons for the product they advertise or might link to that company’s online store where you can purchase the item.
• On business cards: Gone are the days of business cards being packed with information, one QR code can contain all the pertinent contact information as well as link directly to your website.
• On bottles of wine: Scanning one of these QR codes often pulls up information about that particular wine, what foods it pairs well with, how it was made, and information about it’s vineyard.
• There are hundreds and hundreds of other possibilities.  Check out a few more in this handy article.

This QR code links to a petition to save the gulf after the oil spill.

This edible QR code links to information about the origin of food being served.

Can I create my own QR Code? YES! It’s very simple. Some QR reader apps also have the ability to create them as well. My handy app will let me create a QR code for text, for a website, for my contact information, for a location, for an email address, and even for a phone number!  That’s right – I can create a QR code that will automatically call me from that person’s phone if they scan the code.  Whoa!

In conclusion- soon Star Trek will be real life.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles

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Sara Gorsky Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, General