QR barcodes and the death of the URL

I was eavesdropping on a conversation on the tube this morning. They were talking about QR barcodes with the kind of vigour businessmen talk about new technologies. It occurred to me that QR have leapfrogged into the mainstream and now occupy everything from band posters to cooking programmes.

It's a great technology story, a simple solution designed to identify car parts in Japanese factories in the early 90's, laying dorment in the west until the advent of smart phone rocketed the tiny mosaics to ubiquity. What is apparent is that for the first time we can see into the near future, when a URL will seem like a hieroglyph, an encrypted semaphore from a past world that has no relationship to our own.

Whether or not the QR is here to stay is hard to say, what we do know is that mobile has transformed the way we use the web and there's no going back.