Deutsche Telekom Joins Mobile Codes Consortium

Pressure continues to mount for industry standards as telecom giant Deutsche Telekom joins the Mobile Codes Consortium (MC2) – a cross-company group setup to promote unified standards in camera cell-phone barcode reading technology. They join the original founding members Gavitec, Hewlett-Packard, NeoMedia Technologies and Publicis Groupe, to form MC2’s steering group, which will be responsible for guiding the new organization.

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world's leading telecommunications companies represented in 50 countries around the globe. As a unit of Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile International is one of the world's leading mobile communications providers, with more than 100 million customers in Europe and the United States. They follow industry leaders Nokia, KPN and Telefónica O2 Europe who joined the Mobile Codes Consortium last month.

MC2’s aim is to accelerate the adoption of code-reading technologies that will enable users of mobile camera-phones pointed at a printed or displayed 2D barcode, to activate the phone to connect to a particular web-page, download coupons or other digital mediums, make a phone call or send a text message at the click of a button. Based on the widespread adoption of this technology in Japan and the growing popularity of camera-phones in Asia, Europe, and North America, the Mobile Codes Consortium believes that this will have many important applications for both the marketing and public communications industries.

The newly created steering group will now focus on the best approach to enable MC2 to press for widely accepted industry standards. In the first instance, this will mean guiding it until it can join an existing mobile industry body, where the group will be better able to meet its objectives of recommending business models, technology standards, and methods of making mobile code technology useful to the public and to the marketing industry.