Linking the real world to the Internet

Finding ways to get customers who engage with print, ads or objects in the real world to specific websites through links and codes can help spur business.

By NIV ELIS
scan an aesthetic QR code built into an advertisement for Coca-Cola, which was designed by the Israeli company Visualead. (photo credit: COURTESY VISUALEAD)
scan an aesthetic QR code built into an advertisement for Coca-Cola, which was designed by the Israeli company Visualead.
(photo credit: COURTESY VISUALEAD)
When Tesco, a supermarket chain, wanted to increase the size of its market in South Korea, it faced a tough challenge.
The UK-based company simply didn’t have the same number of brick-and mortar stores as its competitor Emart, Korea’s leading supermarket chain.
Without making a huge investment in more stores, it seemed impossible to dislodge itself from the No. 2 spot.
Instead, the company came up with a clever scheme. Rather than building more stores to attract people, it brought the stores to them. In the country’s busy subways, it plastered the walls with photos made out to look like market shelves.
Below each product, they added a blackand- white square image called a QR code, the barcode of the Internet age.
Commuters could stop, scan the codes of the items they wanted on their smartphones and tally up a grocery list they could pay for with a credit card, and have the products delivered to their homes when they returned from work.
The strategy, which the company outlined in a YouTube video in 2011, helped vault Tesco to the top of the market. It also demonstrates the possibilities for businesses in the realm referred to as O2O in business jargon: Offline-to-Online.
Finding ways to get customers who engage with print, ads or objects in the real world to specific websites through links and codes can help spur business, or add a multimedia dimension to an everyday one.
Though QR codes and their ilk are not hugely popular in the West, in Asia they have become ubiquitous. In China, for example, the number of QR code scans rose 350 percent from 2012 to 2013 alone, according to KPBC.
Chinese social media programs such as WeChat offer personalized QR codes to its users; online payment-focused Caifutong has been using them to process payment, and hopes the use of QR will become an alternative to credit card payments online. Baidu, China’s search giant, uses the codes for its app store.
It may come as no surprise, then, that China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba’s first Israeli investment was in a company called Visualead which specializes in QR codes.
“We have already seen O2O as a major area of growth in China,” Zhang Kuo, director of the Alibaba Group’s Mashangtao technology service said in January, when it made the investment.
“Working with Visualead, a dynamic start-up and first-mover in this field, is the next logical step as we seek to enhance customer engagement on mobile platforms. We believe that Visualead’s leading Visual QR Code technology will complement our mobile marketing initiatives, and enhance our ability to take advantage of the booming O2O opportunities in China,” he added.
Visualead’s technology helps liven up ugly black-and-white QR codes, superimposing their pixelated boxiness onto colorful images, logos and graphics. Instead of putting an unsightly QR code off to the side of an ad, or featuring it prominently in the center, the company enables advertisers to make it part of the central image.
Furthermore, it can embed the codes into videos, allowing users to scan them despite the changing background.
“Alibaba is the ideal strategic partner for distributing our technology in China and the leading O2O company worldwide. We are humbled to have Alibaba as a shareholder and on our board of directors, committed to making our Visual QR Code the new worldwide standard for Offline-to-Online engagement,” stated Visualead CEO Nevo Alva at the time of the announcement.
Companies can use an attractive QR code to offer discounts, direct people to sales pages or link to multimedia from ads on the street, billboards, business cards or pamphlets. Better yet, they can glean information on which of their ads is working, and figure out better placement and marketing strategies as a result.
But Visualead may be at odds with another Israeli company that is trying to make QR codes a thing of the past: Winkapp has developed an O2O system that eliminates the need for QR codes altogether.
According to Winkapp CEO Itai Arad, the company started with the idea of making printable hyperlinks. If one of the beauties of the Internet is the way articles can link to one another (or multimedia or other relevant websites) with the classic blue underlined text, Arad thought, maybe there would be a way of recreating that experience on the printed page.
The way it works is that publishers decide what text they want to link, and send an image of the printed page to Winkapp. People reading the published page in print can then pull out their smartphones and focus the cameras on the printed links. Winkapp matches the image taken with the image it has stored on its servers. (You can try it yourself.
Download Winkapp from the Apple or Google store, put it on “demo” mode, and point your camera on this text to open a YouTube video).
That idea, too, opens the doors far beyond hyperlinks.
“We can link anything if it doesn’t have additional markings,” Arad noted.
As long as users know they can scan the printed media before them with their phone, it can link not only text but images, labels, product packages – really anything.
This means that businesses wanting to promote their products don’t have to bother with an unsightly QR code at all.
They can print a coupon and have customers scan it to get a discount; they can print a video screen that links to a YouTube clip; they can print a nutrition label that links to fuller information about how the food is made, or recipe instructions.
One challenge facing Winkapp, however, is giving customers a visual cue that the printed image before them is scannable with their smartphone. Unlike QR codes, which practically beg for some sort of computerized reader, Winkapp could potentially be hidden on a page without readers ever knowing its secret smartphone potential.
That is why the company is encouraging its early clients to at first print the well-known blue underline that is associated with hyperlinks. Eventually, people may get the cue from a well-placed icon or image which indicates it is scannable.
The Internet was once something that lived in a virtual world confined to a desktop. With the increasing popularity of Israeli O2O technology, the world we live in will progressively have a virtual counterpart, easily acces