QR Codes have been used by marketers for years now. They are those square barcodes that may have sparked your curiosity in magazine ads, TV commercials, or on bus stop benches. Dense with information, QR Codes (the QR stands for Quick Response) can store many types of data, including URLs, phone numbers, or email addresses. Lately, I’ve been noticing clever uses of them in my everyday life.

QR Code Applications

Airlines

A recent flight on American Airlines enlightened me to a highly effective use of this new technology, mobile boarding passes. I checked into my flight online and was a sent an email with a link to the airline’s website, containing an image of my boarding information. No paper was needed. When I got to the airport, I just used the image on my phone (which I was of course already planning to take with me) to pass security and board the plane.

Newspapers

Print newspapers all over the country (such as The Oklahoman in which I saw this application) are beginning to use QR Codes to link to supplemental content at the end of a column or article. The newspaper can conserve paper and yet still give the reader more options of what content to consume. The reader can stop at the end of the article or can use a mobile device to see additional multimedia content like a video of the news report.

T-Shirts

More and more I’ve begun to see clothing with QR Codes on them. Most recently, booth workers at a conference wore t-shirts with a QR Code that linked to detailed marketing information about their product. I’ve also seen this strategy used on the shirts given out at 5K races, which explained more information about the charitable cause that was the focus of the race.

Scanning QR Codes

Clearly, QR Codes are not yet omnipresent. The majority of the population does not know how to consume them let alone own a device that can do it easily. Indeed, the best way to read the information in a QR Code is to have a smart phone with a QR Code Reader app and a camera. Sometimes the app is included with the phone. Other times it must be downloaded after purchase. Still, QR Codes have tremendous utility. They are small, information-packed markings and the exploration of their applications will continue. I believe they will evolve into an important technology of each of our everyday lives.

EchoSign is a fantastic web-based electronic signature product that solves a gap that we sometimes face with our current product and service offerings.

The gap can be summarized by a few key points:

- We have a customer or prospect who is using M-Files or an application we wrote to generate/store documents that may need a signature

- M-Files does have electronic signature abilities, but only WITHIN a given firewall, and for users on the same domain

- The customer or prospect wants to sign documents with OTHER entities, that is, outside their firewall and inter-entity

- We don’t want to write our own site-agnostic signature tool (far too much time and cost to duplicate what this tool does)

So with EchoSign, we can take care of all these issues/needs because allows employees at one company to exchange secure, legally binding electronic signatures with other people at another company. Since this signature process takes place via email, the signed documents and signature notifications can be captured into M-Files via the out-of-box Outlook integration.

Additionally, there is also quite an exhaustive API that we can tie into to pull audit history for signed documents, grab the initial documents, and also send documents through to people to be signed.

I look forward to sharing more information in the future with you about how this fits into our plans.

The main focus of this site was to identify a few of the most pressing business problems that we address, such as ISO 9000, FDA CFR Part 11 and SOX compliance, SharePoint performance issues, slow sales cycles, and poor communication with outside customers. We also wanted to give a little bit of insight into the question “What does it mean to be Unstoppable?”, which to us is a very important piece of the puzzle that we take quite seriously.

Enjoy the site, and please feel free to contact us with any questions.