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

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.

They can’t believe how cool it is that people can just point their smart phone’s camera at these little images & instantly visit their webpage or add their contact info to their phone’s address book! No more incorrect URL’s. No longer is it an incredibly tedious task to add a new contact to your phone’s address book!

Scan this code with your smart phone and add Eatery Ads to your phone's Address Book instantly! Get the App for free at http://gettag.mobi

Call Eatery Ads today and let us help you make the most of this great new technology. You can visit our site right now to review how some of our newest advertisers are taking advantage of QR Codes and Microsoft Tags. We can do the same for your business!

For the first 5 business owners who respond, I’m offering a FREE, no obligation 15-minute consultation to help you learn how to employ this new technology for your business. Call Tim at (727) 534-8745 and ask for a 2D Code tutorial.

We didn’t stop improving there. The integration of trivia on the reverse side of the flip menu means that customers are now treated to a mental challenge before, during or after their meal. The answer to the trivia is somewhere on the flip side of that page, deep inside of the sponsor’s ad. Potential customers will now scour our partner’s marketing message just to see if they’re right! Everyone will be looking over your ad to test their friends’ knowledge of these facts.

Test your knowledge of local trivia before and after your meal at many popular restaurants.

Our exciting new format will prominently feature your business in a full page ad format. That’s 4″ x 6″ of full color goodness, designed to get area consumers hungry for your business’s products & services! Enjoy complete exclusivity within your industry to a completely captive audience. They can’t throw away your ad like a direct mail piece. They won’t drive by your ad at 50 mph like a billboard or bench ad. It won’t disappear every 10 seconds like a digital video display ad.

Your future customers will actually be able to act on your promotion! With their smartphone, they’ll be learning more about your services on the EateryAds.com online directory, seeing easy-to-read (and accurate!) maps of your location, linking to your website, and even seeing video you’ve prepared!

Exciting times! Jump in while you still can! Call Tim at (727) 534-8745 today to inquire about availability from Palm Harbor to Tarpon Springs, and from New Port Richey/Trinity to Land O Lakes.

A Very Happy Holidays!

-Tim Dohrman

As with any new endeavor, it is incredibly important to judge the effectiveness, usefulness, or importance of any new process you introduce into your daily business life. The same can be said for your Twitter strategies. It is important to keep a watchful eye on the click-through rates of your various Twitter campaigns. Try to notice trends in your more successful Tweets. Mold and modify your Tweets and see how the changes affect your results.

Again, the only way that we’ve found to track your effectiveness is to use a URL shortening service like Cli.gs or bit.ly. For more information on this topic, please see our earlier blog entry entitled “Track Your Twitter Stats”.

To those who have never experienced the “Twitterverse”, in a nutshell, Twitter is a website where you can leave messages about anything. What you’ve been up to. What you should be up to. What you haven’t been up to. You get the picture.

But how is this useful?

Its usefulness became clearer to me when I started looking at Twitter as a source of news and info about things in which I was interested. When you start wondering what Tweets (as messages are called on Twitter) have been posted about a breaking news item, you’re probably most of the way there towards understanding how Twitter can be a useful daily tool.

Let me break this down into a most basic example. A great thing to do with Twitter is to search for a location to see what’s being said about that location. Let’s say you live near Tarpon Springs, Florida. (Keep in mind, searches for a specific location will only bring up Tweets that specifically mention that location, and only in the format you’ve searched for. For example, if you search for Tarpon, you’ll probably wind up with a large list of deep-sea fishing expedition stories. However, if you more carefully search for Tarpon Springs, then you’ll miss any posts about that city that only refer to the town as Tarpon. And by the way, searching for Land O Lakes tends to result in a lot of posts about butter, so try adding FL to possibly get more accurate results for that Florida town.) Visit www.twitter.com/search and enter Tarpon Springs FL into the search box and click the big SEARCH button.

What you get on the next page is what ordinary people just like you have added to Twitter, with the most recent post at the top of the list. Anything anyone wants to post is there, with no content filtering. Sometimes, there will be shortened links included in the post, a very common element of a post since they are limited to a very short amount of characters (140 letters, numbers & spaces, to be exact).

When you get results that are more or less a good bunch of Tweets that you find interesting, you might want to save your search. This is only available to registered users of the Twitter website (free and completely recommended) and saves your most recent search terms to the right side of your custom Twitter page. Next time, you can just log in to Twitter and click your favorite search term to instantly see what folks are saying about that subject.

So try using Twitter every day for about 15 minutes for one week straight. If you’re at all curious about the daily goings on around you, you’ll probably become a regular user of Twitter.

About the Author: Tim Dohrman is the owner of Eatery Ads, an advertising firm that specializes in the marketing and promotion of area businesses using an innovative system in busy local eateries in Pasco & Pinellas counties on the Suncoast of Florida. He uses Twitter as one more way to let people know about great deals in their town. You can follow Tim and read his Tweets here.