The cool thing is that you don’t even need to download an app to use it. The developer behind the project has made the most of our tutorial about how to develop a Moodstocks – Twitter mashup to be up and running in a breeze. So just tweet the picture of an artwork mentioning @qrtrs to join the fun. It’s that easy!

Some really good talks were given this year. To name a few, I really appreciated:

- the Red programming language talk by Nenad Rakocevic,
- the Ruby / C bindings via FFI presentation by Marc-André Lafortune – that’s a really good alternative to the standard way to extend Ruby with C,
- the very good introduction to the Haskell functional programming language Valentin Robert gave, featuring interesting concepts such as lazy evaluation or pure functions.

But for sure the Lua language definitely made the buzz with no more than 3 talks – a talk covering the basics, another one focused on the really impressive LuaJIT project (aka Just-In-Time compiler for Lua), both by François Perrad, and a last one covering its native integration within Redis (aka scripting-branch) by Pierre Chapuis.

Nothing to say that the ability to extend Redis with Lua scripting is a killer feature! For those who are familiar with Tokyo products it is in some ways pretty similar to what has been done within Tokyo Tyrant.

So let met say congrats to all speakers and participants, thanks to the organization team and see you next year!

The rules are simple: you score each time you scan an ad in magazines or on billboards from the dedicated iPhone and Android apps.

Along with points and badges, you can win a wide range of stuff, from iPads to a real Golf Cabrio. Pretty cool, right?

So far the apps are only available in Belgium. But feel free to ask Volkswagen to expand it to the rest of the world!

We’d like to thank our partners for their awesome integration work: In The Pocket (app design and development) and Tribal DDB Brussel (project leader). You guys rock!

As you can see image recognition has never been faster! A lot of people gave it a try last week during an apero we organized in our loft and they were thrilled. If you’re a developer and want a beta access to the brand new scanner, just let us know!

For example, overlaying information directly on the screen and refreshing it depending on the object you’re pointing to. That’s what we did to “augment” the Citroën Creative Tour, celebrating the 80th birthday of the Yellow Cruise.

And thousands of people loved the experience be it in Paris or Berlin (soon in Moscow and Beijing). For the record, it’s been developed within a couple of days leveraging our image recognition API. Can you believe it?

A lot of you guys wondered how invisible QR codes work. Well, they actually don’t exist! We rely on our state-of-the-art image recognition tech to recognize the book cover itself. The invisible QR Code stuck to it is nothing but a joke!

We’re very sorry if we fooled you. We wanted to emphasize that image recognition works right here right now. It’s now easier than ever to deploy and use it. And thanks to Moodstocks it’s in real-time even on 3G networks:

Do you also want to use image recognition to turn any object into its own QR code? We have everything you need to get yourself up and running in minutes. And if you have any question: feel free to connect. We’re here to help!

The Moodstocks iPhone video SDK is awesome as it lets developers add real-time object recognition in their apps in minutes. It works even on 3G networks and with millions of images!

For more information: feel free to consult our documentation or to connect on our support chat. Feedback welcome!

To start playing:

- download DABLA on your smartphone
- create a chat room
- invite your friends
- write @bot about
- take a pic of of the first object of the hunt

And can you imagine it only required a few hours of work? It’s been developed during “Hack le camping“, mashing up Dabla and Moodstocks‘APIs. Proof is given that your can now develop awesome apps leveraging existing APIs!

So what are you waiting for creating your own object-recognition-based killer app?

But the point is precisely that a QR Code is NOT a call-to-action because:

1) If people don’t know what a QR Code is, basically they don’t even see it. Some are even thinking it’s used for internal purpose, as barcodes are.

2) If people know what a QR Code is, then they have no idea what reader they should use or what content they’ll get.

To adapt a good formula from Tracy Falke speaking of Augmented Reality, QR Codes are the “how”, what we need is the “why” which is precisely the right call to action:

- Gaumont Pathé tells you to scan this movie poster with their app to book your ticket on the go.

- Castorama tells you to scan this product with their app to order it from its catalogue.

- Auchan tells you to scan this product with their app to get an associated recipe.

So a lonely QR Code won’t make it. End users will need explicit details. Obviously Quick Response Codes are just a technology, and as such, they must fade away behind what really matters, the service the brand wants to provide to its users! That’s why we designed the invisible QR Code to let people scan the poster instead!

Stick it everywhere to make the world interactive without spoiling it! If you don’t have your own invisible QR code yet feel free to get in touch.