Ten years from now it will all sound laughably primitive (what, you had to have your phone show the scanner a bar code image, all to transmit a dozen or so bytes?). Right now it's pretty slick, but when I heard about it, some dim light went on in the back of my head: It's not the image on the screen, or the printed image on a paper coupon that matters. It's the magic number in the bar code ... oh, right ... the very first post to this blog was about just that notion.
It's probably also worth noting that the groundwork for this was laid quite a while ago, before the internet and before music or movies became digital, namely the introduction of bar codes in supermarkets. A pioneering piece of modern digitization, though of course digital communication itself is far, far older.
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