QR codes in China
Last week we were travelling up to 海口 from 陵水 on the express train. We buy first class tickets on this train, as this costs only a little more and the three of us can fit comfortably on the two seats. My son is now just below the 1.20m limit. Next time we visit China we will have to buy him a ticket.
I took photographs of the passing countryside and the mountains.
I always like to look at mountains.
But the QR codes took my attention. A few weeks previously I had noticed people paying for ther coffee in Starbuck's, or buying a bottle of water in a supermarket, by scanning a QR code from the register onto their mobile phones. I think there are several systems that people use, one of which is Alipay.
There are QR codes everywhere, these on the train having contact information. Because I had just become interested in Bitcoin, through Steemit, and over the past few weeks had installed far too many wallets onto my tablet (all empty), I started noticing these more than I might otherwise have done.
At the same time as I signed up for Steemit, I also bought my first ALTA report, from @clif High. These are very dense documents, full of possibilities. One thing that I remember from my first reading is that some kind of cryptocurrancy system might appear, with government backing, in China. Seeing these QR codes in widespread use - this one is for a system called 美团 (Meituan), another is through Weechat - made me think that this might only be a small step away.
This is the market in my wife's hometown. Everybody here has a mobile phone, and which ever company, or government, gets to charge 0.001% on the transactions here is going to do very well.
And so here'e another insight from https://twitter.com/clif_high --- somehow or other, he used his linguistic analysis to vastly improve his return on Twitter Ads. I think one of his factors was to use more emotiive language, or something like that.
And here is the ad that Alibaba has up in this small Chinese town. The sexualization here is immediately noticable to English speakers, and also to Europeans, but to the Chinese farmers? Beautifully subliminal, and so even more powerful.
Thank you for reading. @richardjuckes
RIchard, would you be willing to test out a VPN that I've got set up?
(I have a bunch of servers and am pondering setting up a new kind of VPN service)
Sure, but we're in Morocco now. If you want someone inside China ...scratches head...
Hey Richard, that QR code thing on the trains is fantastic! Crypto will hopefully soon be making its mark in China!
It can't be far away.
It is indeed interesting how QR codes are being used widely to hold information. I think its secretive nature probably attracts some people to scan and see what's behind that image... :-)
Somehow they seem more robust than barcodes
I think QR codes a pretty much accepted and used by the Chinese because it's easier than typing. Even in Singapore, there a restaurants and tourist attractions having QR code linking to Chinese content. The propagation of the new form of "currency" is something I have not expected though.