Mobile barcode, especially QRCode is more and more popular in Taiwan in last couple years. There are more and more devices has QRCode reader built in, and we are seeing more and more 2d barcodes on print medias.

I mean it, every day I go to the office on MRTs. I always see some billboards have QRCode on it, and also many free MRT news papers.

I believe on of the most important role is The www.omia.org.tw/">Open Mobile Internet Association, OMIA is found by two industry associations in Taiwan – TEEMA and TCA. The OMIA organized a Taiwan Mobile 2D barcode Promoption working group.

The telecom market in Taiwan are shared by 3 major operators, CHT, FET and TWN. That make it difficulty to launch a new mobile service. Because the market can not be managed by signal operators, due to each of them have only about 30% shares. It’s hard to push device manufacturers to implement the new service based on any requirement defined by signal operator.

So, the key of implementing a new services is to have a industry standard first. The OMIA did a great job on inviting most of the operators, device manufacturers and content providers for the wroking group. And they also try every hard to coordinate every players on defining the `common’ specification for mobile barcodes. (I don’t use the word `standard’, but common specification. Because OMIA is not a standard association, and it does not have power to define a standard.)

But we must say it’s really hard to have every operator’s agreement to open the 2D barcode standards. But we do have a open specification, and there are many mobile phones built in the barcode reader which support the standards.

If you are interested about implementing the standards for Taiwan market, you can download the last specification (3.2.1) from OMIA’s 2D barcode working group website.