Steve Jobs – Person of the Year 2011 – TIME

Steve Jobs – Person of the Year 2011 – TIME.

An eloquent analysis of some inspirational moments with Steve Jobs written by John Lasseter of Pixar.

Now, One Scanner App to Rule Them All

Before now, if you wanted to use your phone to access online data through scanning QR Codes, Microsoft Tags or barcodes, you would have needed 2 or even 3 different apps to do all three tasks.

As of November 1, 2011, Microsoft’s Bing app on the iPhone App Store (download) now recognizes all three major 2d codes being used in marketing today: QR Codes, Microsoft Tags and barcodes. Simply launch the Bing app, select the camera button (to open a live view of what your smartphone’s camera currently sees) and point it at the code to scan. In about one second (seriously fast!), it will detect and decipher the code and offer you the option to click the link to open the page.

With more people using the Microsoft Reader to scan these QR codes, this means they’ll also be able to scan any Microsoft Tag without worrying if the code will scan correctly or not.

The next Microsoft Tag Reader App, due very soon for the iPhone and other phones, is expected to continue to offer access to previously scanned codes through it’s History button, since this is a feature available in the current version.

Bottom line: if you’ve scanned QR codes before with any other reader than Bing or the Microsoft Tag reader, do yourself a favor and get the new apps as soon as you can. You’ll only need one app to scan the 3 most popular codes being used in print and other media today. The readers are snappy, accurate and free.

What has been your favorite QR code scanner? Are you going to try these new options from Microsoft? Let me hear your take below.