Every SXSW badge was equipped with a QR code and at the SXSW Foursquare party the other night, Toby Daniels (founder of Social Media Week) was walking [...]]]> At SXSWi, I saw endless QR codes. While I’m interested in principle and consider myself a technologist of sorts, I scanned a total of zero (yep, zero) QR codes.

Every SXSW badge was equipped with a QR code and at the SXSW Foursquare party the other night, Toby Daniels (founder of Social Media Week) was walking around with a QR code stamp. I even know someone who won $5k from a Microsoft contest that involved scanning QR codes.

But here’s the thing – in my opinion, there are just too many steps for me and the process is unintuitive. I see the squares of black dots and patterns and I want to turn and run the other way.

Having said that, barcodes feel a bit more intuitive. I see them getting scanned on a regular basis and have even scanned a few myself (thank you, college job at Starbucks!), which is one of the reasons why Sticky Bits are particularly interesting to me.

Sticky Bits are sticky barcodes that you can use to attach data to. Unlike QR codes that typically redirect to URLs, Sticky Bits can be used to share almost any form of multimedia.

They’re well designed (even cute on some occasions) and feel more useful than QR codes, which sometimes feel a bit gimmicky. They’re also made to measure. You can attach locations to them and set up notifications so that when someone scans your barcode, you’re able to track that data.

While the physical stickers are a bit expensive (~$0.50/sticker), Sticky Bits offers unique codes available for download for free so that you can tattoo, glue or stamp them anywhere you like.

Would you use Sticky Bits? What would you attach to your barcode?