Billboard barcodes.

The prospect of flashing a mobile phone at a movie poster to get screening times and buy tickets or aiming a handset at a business card to spare the hassle of manually entering the details might seem a bit fancy and futuristic to most, But this Technology does exist and has done for quite some time, Up until now its only been available in Japan.

Known as Quick Response Codes, the square bar codes on flyer's, newspapers or T-shirts provide a direct link to a web page. When mobile phones with internet capability are swiped over the top, the user is taken directly to a related web page. The process allows people to easily obtain restaurant locations, book a taxi, find nutritional information, listen to music, enter competitions and sign up for giveaways.

This technology was pioneered in Japan. Advertisers started placing the codes on billboards, magazines and shopfronts back in 2000. In Japan, mobile phone users only have to position the code inside a square viewfinder on their screen to be taken directly to a corresponding website. Since then, it has been embraced by almost every retail industry and adopted by consumers to encode personal details on business cards, Mc Donalds in Japan have even put codes on hamburger rappers and Supermarkets put them on meat and egg packaging to provide information about the farms that produced them.

They can be scanned and read by software provided in almost every one of Japan's 100 million handsets. However, Special phone software is needed to read the codes. In some cases this can be downloaded from the internet, but Quick Response Code-compatible phones will be available in the future.

According to a survey in Japan, 73 per cent of consumers have used Quick Response Codes, And among teenagers the figure rises to 90 per cent.