What are QR codes and how can they help your business?

Scan this with your mobile phone and see where it takes you...

At its most basic, a QR Code is a barcode on steroids.
They’re used for encoding information in 2D space — on the pages of magazines, in advertisements, on exhibition stand materials and even on TV and Web sites.
So what exactly can you do with QR codes – how can you use them to boost your sales?
You can use them to enable your customers to link to multimedia and video messages immediately – straight to whatever mobile device they may have, at the point at which they see the QR code itself. On a basic level you can use them to send a potential customer to a landing page on your website.
The ability of QR codes to connect people to multimedia digital content is extremely powerful for businesses and consumers alike.
There are a number of apps readily available to enable QR readers on a mobile device – i-nigma for the i-phone works well and there’s also www.barcode.com and 2D-code.co.uk. For the android, you can also try Barcode Scanner. If you’ve already got the price-checking app Red Laser, they’ve recently adapted their technology to accommodate QR code reading.