Marketing people once thought that the QR code would be a great idea, but it’s proving very slow to become universally useful.
Today’s invention is a simpler alternative.
Adverts everywhere, online and offline would carry a small pattern like the one above. This represents the leftmost squares on a phone keyboard.
Rather than having to take any pictures with a smartphone, the user quickly opens the phone and taps on the corresponding black squares.
This would make the entry process much less sensitive to poor visibility or printing.
Only three rows of six keys need be employed (to allow the user to look at and remember the locations of black squares in each row, in succession, with some ease).
This would still provide access to a minimum of 262,000 different mobile pages, before making use of the potential difference between permutations eg CATACT (enough for many of the companies with a need to attract consumer attention on the go).
