Smart UK Project – Press Release

Posted on 22/01/2012 by Terence Eden

QRpedia has been shortlisted for the Smart UK Project to find the UK’s most innovative mobile company.

Here is our press release:

Introducing QRpedia

17 January 2012

QRpedia is proud to have been chosen by the UK National Archives to install our “Smart QR Codes” throughout their exhibits.

This builds on our success with museums around the world.

QRpedia codes can now be found at the National Children’s Museum, Indianapolis, The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, Juan Miro Gallery, Barcelona – and several other cultural institutes in Europe, Russia, and North America.

What people are saying about QRpedia:

“Probably the Coolest QR Thingy Ever Made” New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2011/09/28/28readwriteweb-wikipedia-unveils-probably-the-coolest-qr-t-88101.html?ref=technology)
“QRpedia offers real added value to the museums, especially for foreign visitors. And the introduction of QRpedia costs next to nothing.” Spiegel (http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,790436,00.html)
“Museums are going to love this system” Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com/5845298/how-wikipedia-is-making-qr-codes-useful-again)
“[bridges] the gap between physical and digital content.” The New Media Consortium. (http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2011-Technology-Outlook-UK.pdf)
“[QRpedia] tries to revolutionize the world of museums.” La Stampa (http://www.lastampa.it/_web/cmstp/tmplrubriche/tecnologia/grubrica.asp?ID_blog=30&ID_articolo=9557&ID_sezione=38)
“[QRpedia] aims to have 1,000 of the codes around Monmouth by April.” BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-16359364)

Terence Eden, lead developer on QRpedia said

“We’re incredibly excited that the Smart UK Project have recognised QRpedia. Our innovative language-detecting QR codes help improve visitor interaction with museum exhibits and open galleries, archives, and libraries up to the full power of the mobile Internet.”

“QRpedia is the perfect way to get access to massive amounts of cultural information. A typical museum display has less than a paragraph of text, often just in one language – QRpedia can give encyclopedic information in hundreds of languages. Recently, in Derby Museum, a painting by Joseph Wright was taken away for cleaning. The Museum staff have put a QRpedia code in its place so that visitors can still see a high quality image of the painting, and read information about the painting and its creator.”

Roger Bamkin, co-creator of QRpedia and chair of Wikimedia UK said

“QRpedia has been a successful catalyst for change in museums. We see e-volunteers giving thousands of hours to support museums that they may never visit. Hundreds of new articles have been created in dozens of different languages.”

“QRpedia enables the public to participate and curate objects in a new and interesting way from inside and outside the gallery.”

About QRpedia

QRpedia is the revolutionary way for museums to regenerate their exhibits.
QRpedia’s unique technology automatically detects the visitor’s language and redirects them to a mobile formatted article written in their preferred language.
At a time of increasingly squeezed budgets, QRpedia is a cost effective way for museums to refresh their exhibits.
QRpedia works on any camera phone – no proprietary app is needed.
QRpedia has an enthusiastic community of clients and volunteers who assist new museums as they join.
QRpedia is installed in dozens of art galleries, museums, archives, libraries, botanical
gardens, and other cultural institutions. They use QRpedia because they believe in the spirit of collaboration, and giving access to high-quality information to all their visitors.

QRpedia has been reported by the press in over a dozen languages. We have been featured on American radio, Russian television, Spanish television, as well as several times in the UK.

For more information:

http://qrpedia.org or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qrpedia

Or contact:
Email: Roger Bamkin
Call: +44 7582 020 815

Email: Terence Eden
Call: +44 7717 512 963
Skype / Gtalk: Terence.Eden

Scan to find out more!

QRpedia code

QRpedia – We Made The Shortlist for Most Innovative Mobile Company!

Posted on 12/01/2012 by Terence Eden

We’re incredibly excited to announce that QRpedia has made the shortlist for the Smart UK Project!

We are searching for the UK’s Most Innovative Mobile Companies. Our aim is to celebrate UK innovation and showcase the best examples of UK mobile innovation.

We’ll be presenting at the competition oin January – if we make the final six, we’ll be off to Mobile World Congress.

Look out world! Here comes QRpedia!

Occupy QR Codes

Posted on 02/12/2011 by Terence Eden

I was tweeted an interesting link the other day – We Don’t Make Demands. They have a set of posters for the “Occupy Movement” which incorporate QRpedia codes.

These posters were designed by participants at the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City. They are in the public domain. You are welcome to print them out and post them in your own location.

See all the posters.

I love this use of QRpedia – but I have two minor suggestions.
QR codes work best with some whitespace around them, so:

Move the QR code away from the margin – so it won’t get covered by tape etc.
The call to action – “Learn More At Wikipedia” – should be slightly further away from the main body of the code.

Other than that – very impressive.

OccupyLSX

I took a walk through the OccupyLSX encampment at St Pauls. I have to say, the QR codes on display weren’t as impressive as the above posters.

More Resources

There are a range of Occupy QR codes out there. Some work really well, some don’t. Take a look at:
Occupy Syracuse QR.
Occupy Austin QR.
Occupy Las Vegas QR.
Occupy Davis QR.
And finally, Occupy Legoland.

QRpedia – Custom URLs

Posted on 26/11/2011 by Terence Eden

This blog post is designed to foster a technical and logistical discussion. In much the same way as the earlier QRpedia language discussion did.

One of the most requested features in QRpedia is to have custom URLs.

For example, the British Museum may want a URL of “bm.qrwp.org”. This has two main advantages.

Better analytics. Although the British Museum is the only place likely to have the Rosetta Stone, many museums will have exhibits about “Ancient Egypt” or “Gold”. By differentiating museums, their statistics are easier to view.
Branding opportunities. A user will know that they’ve scanned a code belong to a specific museum.

From a technical perspective, this is fairly easy to implement. Assuming that a museum is only generating codes in one language, we simply map $museum.qrwp to $language.qrwp – and record in the logging database as per usual.

However, there are a number of challenges around the naming of museums which means considerable thought is needed before we implement this.

Length

QR codes work best when the URL inside them is as short as possible.

This means, we don’t want a URL like “BritishMuseum.qrwp.org” or even “PrestongrangeIndustrialHeritageMuseum.qrwp.org”.

So, we need to choose suitable abbreviations.

Language Clashes

We could create a custom URL for the British Museum of “bm”. However, that’s also the same language code as the Bambara language.

There are several Language Codes in use – covering two and three letter combinations. There are currently 282 different language versions of Wikipedia.

Those mostly use two or three letters to distinguish between languages – but there are the occasional surprise like “bat-smg”