What are QR codes? You've seen them. QR codes are everywhere these days. They are those square black and white things that look like some form of modern art. They're on billboards, on the sides of city buses, in ads inside magazines, business cards. They are even showing up on t-shirts.

QR code stands for Quick Response code and even though you and I might have only just now begun to notice them, QR codes have been around since as long ago as 1994. They were created by a Toyota subsidiary to track vehicles during the manufacturing process.

Qr codes are pretty much the same things as regular old bar codes on the products you buy that get scanned by the clerk at Wal-Mart or your local supermarket. But those bar codes encodes data in only the horizontal plane (as scanners read the width and distance between the vertical lines), QR codes encode data both horizontally and vertically in a grid of tiny squares so they can hold a lot more information than regular old bar codes.

In order to scan QR codes you'll need to install a QR scanning app on your smartphone. I use an app called QR Reader on my iPhone. But there are several others out there and most of them are free to use. Once you have a QR scanning app on your phone, open it and use it to snap a picture of a QR code. Then you will be taken to a web page in your phone's browser, shown a video, or generate an SMS text or call to someone, all depending on what the QR creator set up the code to do.

Creating QR codes is easy because there are so many places on-line that will help you do it for free. I have used Kaywa QR Code Generator to make to make a QR code that directs those scanning it to the home page of my Website. It worked so well that I had some magnetic signs made with the QR code on them and I drive around with those signs attached to the doors of my car. In fact, that very QR code is the one displayed at the top of this page. If you were to scan that with a phone's QR reader app, it would fire up the browser on your phone and take you to my home page, so give it a try.

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