I was reading this post by Joel way back in Sep 2000 (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html) and this particular paragraph was very interesting:
"About two months ago, Wired magazine had a different technology for going to a URL automatically from an ad. It was some kind of weird thing where you held up the page to your digital camera, took a digital picture, and ran this wacked out software that navigated your browser to the Altoids home page. So now instead of typing 7 letters I have to find my digital camera, turn it on, wait for it to boot up, take a picture of the page, turn off the camera, wait for it to flush its memory to flash, remove the flash card from the camera, take the network card out of the PCMCIA slot, put the compact flash into it's holder, plug it into the PCMCIA slot, find the picture, run the software which I previously installed, oh, don't get me started. It would be a half-hour trauma just to go to the damn Altoids web site, where you can't even buy an Altoids, for heaven's sake. Curious."
Isn't that what smart phones and QR codes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code) do today? Ideas may not always fail because they are stupid. They could fail just because the conditions weren't right at that time.
"About two months ago, Wired magazine had a different technology for going to a URL automatically from an ad. It was some kind of weird thing where you held up the page to your digital camera, took a digital picture, and ran this wacked out software that navigated your browser to the Altoids home page. So now instead of typing 7 letters I have to find my digital camera, turn it on, wait for it to boot up, take a picture of the page, turn off the camera, wait for it to flush its memory to flash, remove the flash card from the camera, take the network card out of the PCMCIA slot, put the compact flash into it's holder, plug it into the PCMCIA slot, find the picture, run the software which I previously installed, oh, don't get me started. It would be a half-hour trauma just to go to the damn Altoids web site, where you can't even buy an Altoids, for heaven's sake. Curious."
Isn't that what smart phones and QR codes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code) do today? Ideas may not always fail because they are stupid. They could fail just because the conditions weren't right at that time.
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