Barcodes linking to online content V (and last)

[Computers and Internet] Tokyo’s Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s leading newspaper, has been printing on the corner of a page a series of black dots, which are not Japenese characters. These black dots are in a tight, uneven pattern. From a distance it looks like a woven fabric, and closely it looks like a snowy TV screen. When this page is fed through a scanner, the true nature of the image is revealed: it’s software. In this way, the newspaper is sending music files, video games software, etc., to its 10 million customers.

From April 2000 to February 2004, Yomiuri used Intacta (or SmartBars) two-dimentional barcodes to provide its readers with more than just encrypted website links. The newspaper regularly offered printed multimedia content that one was able to decrypt with a dedicated software and a 300dpi scanner. However, after only 6 months, it scaled down the effort due to the eroding demand and the overwhelming growth of email communication.
The technology had first grown out of an alliance between Intacta (an Israeli company based in Atlanta which had originally developed the codes for military purposes) and Japanese electronics giant Fujitsu, which was looking for ways to promote a new line of hand-held scanners. The codes could be used to protect sensitive data (until the recipient could decrypt it) as much as to encode and compress any kind of data(text, music, photo) to be faxed. For text, each square inch could hold up to 2,000 characters which also meant that a typical newspaper story could be reduced to two square inches.
The codes were also very resistant to crumples, scratches, missprints and could be reproduced even if up to a quarter of the symbol was missing thanks to their encoding algorythm.
Hayashi-san from the Yomiuri told us that over the past few months the codes had only been used to distribute some games of Ugo and Shiougi (similar to chess) and that since that readership had also decreased they had decided to withdraw the codes altogether at the end of February. They have no plans to replace the codes by the more recent QR-codes at the moment.

In the UK, the technology was showcased for one day only in a daily tabloid: the Daily Express.

[BBC News] Readers of the 17 May 2000 edition of the Daily Express got a chance to try out one of the technologies in an experiment conducted with the help of the BBC's Tomorrow's World TV science programme. Printed on page 48 of that edition of the Express was a panel of dots that resembled a very smudged picture. The panel contained a video clip (of 2 seconds).

It seems that Sanyo were using the codes on their business cards for security and identification purposes. I am pretty sure that they have now replaced them with QR-codes which can be decoded by Japanese mobile phones. The contact info is then easily added to the phone's contact book.