Since January 2010, Bus stops all over Paris is starting to have Mobiletag‘s Flashcode printed on the bus route. Flashcode is a two-dimensional barcode system similar to QRCode, which has been in use in Japan for years.

I have never been to Paris before, but my cousin who has been living in France for the last 6 years told me that she had never seen such squarely barcode until recently. In fact, during my 10-day stay in the city, I could see only a handful of such barcode appeared on posters and banners. I am suspecting that handheld devices which can handle Flashcode is still not common (still a lot of people are using old Nokia handsets), so there is less incentive for mobile device providers to offer such functionality. Hopefully the new generation of smart phone with built-in barcode reader and 3rd-party app can help to solve the problem.

I blogged about Mobio and other mobile payment platform that utilize such 2-D barcode technology. See my previous posts:

• Mobile payment with Mobio
• Mobile Payment Update

Update:

For more posts about QRCode, please check out these related posts.