mocoNews and the BBC report on Microsoft developing a new color barcode solution (“MS Color Barcodes Will Store More Data…” and “Colour barcode system to hit DVDs“). These new barcodes can store up to 3,500 alphanumeric characters.

As I have mentioned in a previous blog entry (“Mobile Barcodes and Semacodes“), there is clearly a potential market for this type of technology having proven itself in Japan. As pointed out by James in the mocoNews piece, this is yet another mobile barcode and risks fragmentation of the market. James also says that with more storage capacity, there are likely more creative applications that can be built with the mobile barcode.

My belief is that in the near-term, barcode interoperability is more important than the density of the barcode. This does not mean that the world should only support one barcode technology. What this means is that consumers can’t worry about which application on their phone to use with which barcode. It is absolutely critical that if a consumer sees something that looks like a barcode, they know that their phone can read it. Without consumer adoption, brands won’t use barcodes in their products and the economics collapse.

Mobile operators and handset manufactures need to take this to heart and insist on clients that support multiple barcodes. Brands should look strongly at choosing barcode technologies that have broad base support.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to the need for higher density mobile barcodes. In mobile today, there is a high cost to connect to the Internet: it costs real $$ to use mobile data, there is a latency with each request/response, and non-integrated applications leads to a lot of context switching in the user experience. If these costs continue, having a higher density mobile barcode is important because the data in the barcode will either need to stand on its own, or it will have to be compelling enough to incent the subscriber to connect. If these costs are removed, there will be little reason for higher density barcodes as they can simply store URLs.

Either way, I am dubious that 3,500 characters provides either enough information for compelling disconnected applications at the cost of further fragmenting the market.