Microsoft Tag: A Mobile Tagging System

A colleague of mine sent this my way http://www.microsoft.com/tag/. It’s a fairly new beta service that Microsoft is playing around with called Tag. Coincidentally it’s in a similar vain to something I am currently working on, Augmented Reality, which we’ll be launching later this week. Anyways back to the point, I love it when something that should be complicated is super easy to use, and that’s what I love about this. It took no longer than 10 minutes from receiving the link in an email to having a printout in my hand that launches my blog when my iPhone app points to it, and that time included reading up on it, creating the tag, and downloading the iPhone app. So obviously I can’t spend more than 10 minutes blogging about it!

In a nutshell it creates a visual “bar code” that its accompanying mobile app is able to recognize and react to. There are four Tag types to chose from which you pick when creating the tag, they all look the same but react differently upon scanning:

- URL – Takes the user to a web address. Would work just about anywhere – print or TV.
- Free Text – Sends a free text to the user. Would be ideal for magazine coupons, instead of having to cut it out, just scan to get it sent to your cellphone.
- vCard – Sends a mobile business card to the user. Ideal for an email signature, and obviously an actual business card, doh!
- Dialer – Automatically dials a phone number. Could be handy to just scan the menu and have it auto dial your favorite carry-out restaurant.

So I created a tag that links to my blog:

Download the app from http://gettag.mobi and point your mobile camera to my Tag. It seems the app is available for all mobile platforms, I’m on the iPhone and was redirected to iTunes to download it. You can print off the tag and scan it, or just scan it straight off the screen (this will be sweet for video!), it doesn’t hang around either, as soon as it recognizes the tag it just takes you straight there.

Now you’ve seen it in action create one yourself. It’s simple:

1. Login using you Windows Live ID

2. Create your Tag

3. Render the graphic

It seems you can customize the Tag to make it more brand specific, though I haven’t investigated this. There’s also some cool reporting functionality, now marketers can track the success rate of individual print and TV ads.

Okay so I just did a little research (which takes this post over the 10 minute mark!) and I guess this technology entirely original, and something similar called QR Code has been in effect for a number of years and is commonly used in Japan. In fact now that I see a sample image I definitely recognize it from different packaging I have seen over the years. Some people out there have tried to suggest Tag is just Microsoft trying to re-invent the wheel, but I would say this technology has a different goal in mind, to the QR Codes at least. An apparent Pro that the QR Code appears to have is more like a Con from how I’ve been looking at the technology – that it contains the information about it’s content embedded within it, so it doesn’t require a third party gateway to do a look-up and return instructions. But because of this the image is physically dependent on the instructions contained within it, whereas with the Tag technology it appears the image can be quite customized to match a brand or campaign regardless of what it does, and the gateway look-up guarantees being able to track all the interactions. And another plus with a gateway look-up is being able to change the images response (many times over) once it’s published.