Aftonbladet, a Swedish tabloid, announced that they from today are going to use mobile barcodes in their printed version of the newspaper. This, to connect the online and offline version of Aftonbladet and in that way offer more value to their readers.

The platform that they have chosen to collaborate with and promote is BeeTagg. BeeTagg supports both Datamatrix and QR-code, but they also have their own standard called simply BeeTagg. Unfortunately Aftonbladet has chosen the BeeTagg format but on the bright side the application that everybody will download supports other open formats as well.

I tested the application on my N95 today and it was really great. One of the best barcode applications on the market actually. We also tested BeeTagg on an iPhone and it worked quite good.

Maybe this is going to be the Swedish breakthrough for barcoding that we have waited for over a year now. When we've been around talking to companies about our project Comments.se all have been wainting for a big player to do all the hard work of introducing and teaching the public about the "new" way of interacting, now this player has turned out to be Aftonbladet. One of the things we have learned when working with mobile barcoding technology is that it's almost impossible to get people to download and install an application on their mobile phone, it's just to complicated.

I hope they will succeed and really open up for other mobile barcoding projects such as Comments.se.