QRCode

SketchBooks SecretWritinglittle mobile phone readable codes (kind of like a bar code)

"Unfortunately, this craze that has been going on for a significant amount of time in Japan just hasn't made it overseas to America yet. The US industry is a little worried. I have read that there are applications that allow a user to scan a code on a product in a store, and then compare prices on Amazon.com. The other problem is that RFID is just over the horizon. The US Industry may find this more beneficial to them. RFID can't be read by cell phones and will not be visually identifiable to our society."

• apparently you can turn anything into a QRcode!
  http://nfg.2y.net/games/jphonegames/v601shqrcode.shtm
  http://www.psytec.co.jp/freesoft/
  http://nfggames.com/neography/pivot/entry.php?id=69
• some software to allow non QR phones to read the codes
  http://note.page.us/QRCodec
• already there are rip off’s and copies of this idea
  http://semacode.org Semacode doesn’t output nearly as beautiful images, and it has that american salesmanship taint which makes it less fun.
  

a method of using geometric shapes combined with color to store up to 256GB of data on a sheet of paper or plastic. The article says
“Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in “rainbow format” as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch. The paper can then be read through a specially developed scanner and the contents decoded into their original digital format and viewed or played.”
http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?newsID=7424

could be a hoax. but even if so, its an ElegantMedia idea.