THE QR CODE COMEBACK, THANKS TO APPLE!

By Mike Gunderson, Founder of Gunderson Direct

SCAN ME NOW

Quick response codes, or QR codes for short. If you take a moment and think back, chances are you can remember seeing these little scannable square boxes somewhere. Maybe you recall seeing them on the back of a clothing tag, on a table card at a restaurant offering 2-for-1 Margaritas, or even on a postcard talking about a home WiFi system (see more examples).

At any rate, QR codes are really useful — they can be used in a variety of engaging ways. For example, you can direct someone to your website and provide them with a coupon for a product or service (see the image below), or use a QR code as a method to share your contact information. Unfortunately, QR codes have never been widely adopted. Maybe they were a bit ahead of their time or cumbersome to use, meaning you had to download an app to scan the code — definitely not as easy as clicking a button or typing a URL into an address bar.

However, with some recent iOS software updates from Apple, things have changed. One new feature from the recent release is the ability to scan QR codes with your camera (as shown below). This…