a) Complete the profile with useful information: Link your businesses’ social media accounts to your profile, if you have company promotional videos or Flickr galleries, add these using our widget functionality. Ideally, you should aim for 3-4 widgets on each profile. Choose widgets that give people you meet the best impression of your business.

b) Print the QR code correctly: Making sure people can scan the QR codes is vital. The QR codes need to big enough to register on most smart phones. Because of this, you’ll want to print them around 15mm square, 13mm square at very minimum. Position the QR code somewhere on the card where it’s prominent. We recommend adding some text below the QR code that explains to people not familiar with QR codes that they should scan the code. “Scan me” works for most businesses. Have a look at our pre-designed QR borders available from your account dashboard as well.

c) Promote the QR code: When you hand your QR-code-enabled business card out – let people know what it does. You’ll find it’s often a great discussion point, and if it results in the person you’ve met scanning your card and remembering you, you’ve probably got your ROI for QRky. Handing company brochures out at networking events is embarrassing for most people but encouraging people to scan your QR code can add to a conversation, not take away from it.

d) Use your QRky code on different mediums: Add your QRky code to your email footer, onto company headed paper or onto your personal staff profile on your company’s website. QR codes can be scanned from almost any medium, so wherever people may like to save your contact details to their phones or find out more about you as a person, add your QRky code!

If you have any questions or feature requests, just email support@qrky.co.uk.

The big three social media sites to get involved in are Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These sites attract the most users and depending on your business, you may want to get involved in all three, or, in just one or two.

Ask for feedback and new ideas, and action it: Most customers will love giving you feedback and new ideas. Don’t just accept feedback and leave it on the social networks, make sure you action the feedback. Once you have, let your followers know you have done so. You’ll give customers a sense you’re a company that cares and improve what you do at the same time.

Questions, polls and competitions over self promotion: Most social media experts agree that even social media accounts for companies should be about conversation and sharing useful information. Sharing Polls or competitions to win your products will create a buzz around your company and give the impression you care about your followers. Who would want to follow a company constantly tweeting about their latest report? Including your self promoting material is fine, as long as it’s among lots of useful information.

You don’t need to waste hours on social media: Social media often gets forgotten because there’s a perception it requires hours and hours of time investment. That’s not necessarily true. Ask fellow staff members in your company during existing weekly meetings about any interesting topics that could be shared with your followers – for example – a poll from the research department, a free product giveaway from the marketing department and maybe some sector-specific news from anyone who has any.

Target your social media to get useful feedback: Companies need more than friendly followers to make social media worth while. Firstly, make sure you track all web traffic from the social media site back to your main site and all the way back to your online presence goals, allowing you to quantify your efforts. Secondly, target questions to get useful responses – like “which product shall we release next” – not – “how’s everyone doing today”. Before starting a social media campaign, work out your goals and then behave accordingly. You may well want a couple of different strategies for different social media networks as each social media site has a different target audience and mutual understanding of how people conduct themselves online.

Rule 1: Make sure you print the code large enough
How big your code should be printed depends on how many characters you “encode” into it. It can take an absolute maximum 7,000 characters, but realistically most people will encode about 20 letters or so (a URL, for example).
The phone’s camera detects the distance between the little black dots to decipher the data, so each phone will be able to scan codes to different resolutions depending on the phone’s camera quality. Stay safe and stick to the lowest common denominator (we use a two-year-old Blackberry for this). Try and reduce the length of data you encode to reduce the size you need to print the code – for example if you’re encoding a URL, use a shortener such as Bit.ly.

Rule 2: Make sure you leave enough space around the code
When looking at a QR code you’ll notice it’s made up of many small little black squares. You need to leave a border around the code that is three times the width of the smallest little square. This allows phones to focus on the codes to read them.

Rule 3: Leave enough contrast if you change the code colours
You can make QR codes quite colourful and some recent articles in this illustrious organ have increased interest in this so-called ‘QR Art”. It’s a great idea, and we do it too, but take care when doing so.
Phones use the contrast between light and dark to make out the squares. If you make the background too dark or the code too light, it will either take a long time to scan (by which time people get bored and stop trying) or won’t work at all anymore. We also don’t recommend reversing the codes (making the code light and the background dark) as only a few readers can decipher these.

Background:

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range wireless connectivity technology that enables data transfer through a simple touch of devices, allowing compatible devices within a few centimetres of each other to communicate with each other. Most people in the London will have used the technology with their London Oyster transport card which uses NFC chips. Quick Response (QR) technology (2D Datamatrix barcodes) is a type barcode that can be read by any smart-phone through the phone’s camera and a generic, free app that decodes the barcode into data.

In the past 6 months a debate has been growing over whether NFC technology will kill QR codes. NFC offers a more user-friendly interaction with simpler and fewer user steps for interaction (just touch two things together). A comparison of the two technologies makes sense because they both offer a way to trigger interactive content on mobile phones.

Journalists and bloggers wordwide are joining in the NFC/QR debate but many often miss the crucial arguments in the debate. In this blog, I’ll take a look over the pro’s and con’s of NFC over QR and argue why I think NFC is a complimentary technology, not a replacement. I’ll take a logical look to the industry and predictions within it.

Comparison:

Infrastructure: NFC technology requires special “initiator” hardware that creates an NFC field searching for a “target”, a NFC chip that holds data for the device to pick up. It is thought that iPhone5’s and future iPad’s will have NFC initiators built into them and various mobile operating systems are starting to add NFC capability, ready for any hardware that supports it. QR codes use the camera already in the phone and only need a small “QR reader” app to enable the device to support the technology. There are thousands of free QR apps available for almost all phones on the market and some phones (e.g. Some Blackberries) come with a pre-installed QR reader. In the near future, it’s reasonable to expect that the mobile operating systems will start including QR readers as standard on all phones.

Reach: There are still very few phones that support NFC on the market and I only come across the phones at specialised exhibitions or when I’m talking to NFC experts. The predictions are however that the availability will change very quickly. Reports state that 10-15% of phones on the market will support NFC next year – but – how many people will have these phones? My guess is that it will take 2-4 years before enough people have changed their phones over to an NFC enabled device.

Production & Implementation: To implement NFC a publisher must embed a NFC chip into every target (thing that someone should interact with). For things like Point of Sale displays and Travel Information Points, NFC will become a logical solution to implement. For direct-mail/business card type applications, where many items are handed out at a low cost, NFC will add a significant cost. It will be interesting to see what NFC Printing systems come onto the market and what cost will be associated with NFC chips as demand increases. At the moment, each chip is sold wholesale for between £0.40 (if you buy 10,000) and £20.00 (bought individually). Publishers will also need an encoding device (to write the data onto NFC chips), but this can already be done by most of the NFC phones. Generating QR codes is simple once you have a generator (a library of code that generates the image from text you enter). QR codes can then be printed for free, quickly and easily. The barriers to adding QR codes are really very low.

Remember: content is King

People forget that content is king when they start working with new exciting technologies. NFC and QR both offer great new ways to encourage users to look at content, but the content itselfand design/layout of the content is the most important thing. For NFC and QR it is vital that the content that is linked (regardless of which technology it’s linked with) is immediately relevant and that the content is optimised for the user’s device so that it works well on all the mobile devices in the market. For both NFC and QR this means not just opening a generic non-mobile-optimised homepage, but making as much effort on the “what” as the “how”.

QR and NFC both have their own strengths

I see one revolutionising way that NFC will be implemented: Mobile Payments. The large players (Google, Paypal, Visa, Intuit and a host of others) are getting behind NFC as a payment method. A recent study predicted that NFC mobile payments would grow from a £0 to a $50 billion industry by 2014. The fact that everyone will get used to the user interaction of NFC because of this does give NFC a boost.

Outside mobile payments, it’s foreseeable that NFC will take over some of the applications of QR codes. Point of Sale displays, tourist information points, travel information at stations – applications where one NFC chip will be scanned by many. However, I see a future for QR codes too. The notion that NFC will wipe out the printing industry is flawed, and I believe QR codes will continue to thrive in the printing industry. It will become as easy to scan a QR code as it is to touch an NFC tag.

The difference between the two won’t be as big as people say

Looking at both technologies in a demo comparison today and most people are impressed with the NFC interactions. Step forward 2-3 years however (when NFC becomes feasible to use in mainstream advertisements) and there are two factors:

a)       QR codes will be much easier to scan. Smart phones will have better cameras (which are the factor holding back fast QR scanning on the older phones). QR reading software will be built into the phone’s camera software, meaning no special app is required.

b)       NFC will need security features to safeguard against eavesdropping devices. Imagine you have NFC turned on while on a train and someone standing next to you simply holds a device within a few centimetres of your phone and pulls all your data off it. This type of security problem will mean users need to “turn on NFC”, which is the same process as turning on a phone’s camera. The difference in usability is then reduced to “touching the phone” rather than “pointing the phone’s camera”.

The future for people who have invested in QR like we have

I’m sure many people using QR for business has come across the question “what will you do when NFC comes along?”. Our company has invested in building our platforms that deliver turn-key professional QR code applications. However, 99% of what makes our platforms so good is content management and content delivery, *not*the QR generation element.

Anyone who has made an effort to create clever QR marketing applications/campaigns could quickly add a MStags, NFC chips, JagTags or any other “link” to the system. QRky could add MSTag as a print-option by linking a simple API into the platform. We could offer the option of ordering your own NFC tag with a few days time investment.  We may well do so, once we see NFC taking off.

Companies that rely on the code itself to win customers are just riding the wave of the uneducated customer, charging customers for something they can get for free. They had a short-term future anyway. Nothing is lost. If they offer something genuinely useful on top of QR code generation and simple tracking, the chances are that a tweak to integrate NFC or any other technology is relatively simple. And the cost of implementing NFC in an application is very small compared to the cost of setting up the backend infrastructure that may be required to support it. The people that will benefit most from NFC will be the ones that have experience and understanding in QR technology, and understand how both technologies have different strengths and weaknesses.

Silicon Valley approaches to start-ups are actually quite similar to the UK, but they focus on a few aspects that could be key.

Last week I returned from South by Southwest (SXSW), an interactive, music and film festival that is seen by many as the international conference where the best technology companies network and learn from each other. Twitter and FourSquare both launched at SXSW, Tim Ferris launched his career by presenting his Four Hour Work Week book – the list goes on. Companies like Google and Mashable compete to hold the best parties where everything is complimentary, trying to woo the world’s top tech talent.

After a week of catching up with that I missed while I was away in Austin, Texas, I had some time to reflect about what the real differences between the “Silicon Valley Tech Crowd” and the “Birmingham Tech Crowd” really are. Why are there so many successful tech companies from Silicon Valley and so few (large) ones from Birmingham, or the UK in general?

Key learning points I took away from SXSW that I can implement

-         Design over functionality

This is the most important lesson I’ve learnt from attending SXSW. As a company founder it is so easy to focus on building the best functionality possible and start your company by building code. However, you’re set for a hard, gruelling path of constantly needing to re-work your code and re-design your front-end as you slowly realise what you’ve left out.

What the Silicon Valley Crowd would do: First mock everything up with a Wireframing tool and write some user stories (we use GoMockingBird.com). Talk to your prospective users with your wireframes and see if they agree you have what they would use and see all your features as necessary. Then, decide your branding and start designing your platform with an image editor (We use Adobe Photoshop) and show it to your prospective users again. Now, you can start building some code, but just the front end HTML/Javascript. Show your users again, see how users interact with your design. Once you’re totally happy that this will work really well, start coding. The coding will be a lot less time consuming and expensive because everyone sees exactly what’s expected.  You’ll also have your nice-looking prototype ready much sooner so you can start showing investors, mums and friends what you’ve given up your full-time well-paid job for much sooner.

It’s easy to agree with the concept that design should be the primary focus but it’s really hard to implement it.  At QRky we’ve invested heavily in technology but have always done the design on a more ad-hock basis. Only recently have we started investing more heavily in design and the service is starting to look much “prettier”. Customers purchase pretty systems, not necessarily the ones with the best functions. I’m guilty of being such a customer – I pay for prettier CRM systems rather than use free ones that arnt so enjoyable to use. I pay £30 a month for our Xero accounting system – primarily because it looks nice and it encourages me to do accounting.

Apple have seen huge success by simply making their product look good. When they started with the MP3 player (iPod), their product wasn’t the best functionality wise – it looked the best. They then improved their technology because they could afford to invest in it – because everyone was buying their product – because it looked pretty.

Good design leads to good revenue which leads to good sustainable functionality (because you can invest in it) – and your innovation will be build around what users think – because you haveusers to listen to when you innovate.

-         Measure Measure Measure

The second key element is analytics – the Silicon Crowd put analytics as one of the biggest priorities. “Analyse everything” people say again and again. The key is to break down analytics into the individual steps a user goes through so you can get a real understanding of where you’re service is working and where it’s not. When you’re analysing traffic to your site, don’t just analyse hits and bounce rates, analyse Acquisition rates from different sources, Conversion rates into paying customers (if you’re using a Freemium model), Engagement (Once they’re using your service), Satisfaction and Feature use (this is by no means an exhaustive list). Once you’re collecting this data you’ll very quickly see where you’re problems lie and be able to fix them. Tools that are used frequently to help with this data include Google Analytics,www.kissmetrics.com and www.mixpanel.com.

Things we can’t do anything about

-         Investment:

Money seems to be much more freely available in Silicon Valley. The key seems to be that investors “get it”. They are tech savvy, often ex-tech-entrepreneurs who really understand the tech. In the UK there are only few investors who have a solid grip on technology – most understand physical product or bricks and mortar businesses better. I think a logical reason for this is that most investors have grey hairs and computers were only just in their infancy when they learnt the way the world works.

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The next step is to start A/B testing every font-end change you make. See what effect your new homepage or new user flow has on your figures. If it’s negative, go back to what you had. For some information about how that works – see http://bit.ly/SplitTestQRky . Its all about quick iterations and tests.

The key thought I came away from SXSW with was that the Silicon Valley crowd don’t have any “super special powers” that we can’t compete with, their only advantage is their focus. That’s something we can learn from.  The discussions on issues that start-up founders are facing are the same. I came back with encouragement that, if we have the right idea and right focus, wecan create the next Facebook, Twitter or Google here in the UK.

One of the best parts of going to the conference was meeting the people involved in the Romanian tech scene. There is an abundance of highly skilled, intelligent men and women who are working on some fantastic tech start ups. A couple of our favourites are Palkoo and Squeeqly and we recommend you check these out.

There were a number of great keynote speakers, with our personal favourite being Mark Randall who gave an inspiring talk about starting up your business and boosting it’s success. One of the main points that we would push to other people are testing your market as soon as possible and start to sell very early on in the life of the business to ensure that there is a market for what you are doing before you make an investment in a complete product build.

A huge thank you goes out to the organisers of the event and the attendees who made us feel very welcome and we had a fantastic time. If the How to Web conference happens against next year we would highly recommend to people from all over the world as it was a fantastic experience.

As entrepreneurs we depend on low fixed costs, support and networking. These incubators provide this with free rent, experienced mentors and a number of hosted networking events. It is the perfect platform and helped us to expand to the next stage.

This blog post is our way of saying thank you to the teams that run both and to recommend any entrepreneurs that are looking to start out to look for incubators in your local area and use them.

Working closely with the event organisers, QRky generated individual QR codes for every attendee at the conference and seamlessly integrated them into the usual badge printing process run by the Event Management company. It was a great success with attendees scanning each other’s badges and making lasting connections.

We pre-populated the account with the basic contact details for each person and gave attendees the opportunity to add their digital content to their codes using individual usernames and passwords which were emailed our the day before.  It was great to see how many people logged in to add content.

The take up in the event management industry has been encouraging. Offering our services in this industry was never in our original business plan and to-date we’ve done zero marketing to the sector. Despite this, we’re booked to include our technology at the ICT Cluster conference in November and have been contacted by a number of event organisers to discuss the use of our technology.

As a response to this demand, part of the new system upgrade  includes a bespoke Event Management panel and we’ll be integrating some event booking platforms such as EventBrite soon. With this, and with Hello Digital as an excellent case study for how QRky can work at a conference, we’ll also be starting to market to event companies – so watch out for QRky barcodes on event badges near you soon!