Local businesses are the hot market right now for online services. Most big businesses have a pretty solid online presence at this point and the competition is pretty fierce in this area. Local businesses by contrast don’t really have the resources to establish a very well though-out web identity and, so far, there hasn’t been a real need for most of them. Big web companies, Google is no exception, have realized that this largely untapped market has a lot of potential, so many are pushing hard to win small businesses over. Google has now made a pretty big move sending out stickers to 100,000 businesses in the US, labeling them as “Favorite Places.”
That in itself isn’t exactly an innovative move, but the interesting part is that these stickers feature two-dimensional bar codes, known as QR codes, which can be decoded by phones or devices with QR code readers and store some sort of information usually used in commercial applications. In this particular case, the QR code links to a the “Favorite Places” page for the particular store, restaurant or whatever business may be sporting it.
The page has some general information about the business, a map, working hours, phone numbers but also reviews and other third-party of user-generated information. The idea is that users stan… (read more)