There’s a number of mobile barcode systems intended to “connect the physical world with the digital world”, to quote Cyriac Roeding of CBS. Most of them simply encode a URL which is read by software on the phone to download information from a WAP page—some of the stories I’ve read imply that even more information is encoded into the code—enough to create a sound track from the data, for example—but that strikes me as requiring a lot more data than can be realistically fit on the space. The story in the NYT spends a lot of time talking about the potential of the technology, especially to advertisers, and even more time talking about all the implementations in all the other parts of the world. It’s not until the second page that the article admits that Verizon, AT&T and Sprint all refuse to confirm they’re considering the technology.