Category: QR Codes

Smartphone users have a wealth of information available to them by scanning QR codes on products and in advertisements, and will now be able to make charitable donations through the same format.

QR codes to aid 6,000 charities

The start-up Paystik has launched a campaign to raise charitable donations for over 6,000 charities using the QR code as a means to make quick and easy payments when consumers wish to donate to a charity of their choosing. The goal is to use QR codes for easy payments to both charities and small businesses. Both can sign on with Paystik to produce QR codes, thus reducing problems with billing and advertising.

The result will be an app for smartphones, allowing consumers to send quick and easy payments. Project C.U.R.E. will begin a campaign this week with direct mail. Last year, this organization reached out to consumers for charitable donations over the holidays and supplied over $40 million in medical care and supplies around the world. This campaign will be aimed at merchants this year.

QR codes gaining in US

The US has been a hard sell for mainstream use of QR code for payments. Companies like Paypal, DigiMo, Qriket, and Doxo have been accepting payments through QR, though none have become a huge success in that category. It is thought that smartphone saturation in the US could see a change in that regard, with smartphone use steadily on the rise. Still, a QR code is often a hard sell in the US. Some consumers are still not sure what their purpose is and are not aware of how to use the technology.

Co-founder James Ioannidis said, “Obviously, the first time is the hardest. But after on-boarding them, we see consumers making repeat transactions.” He went on to explain that he feels aiding charities will bring Paystik success where other campaigns featuring QR code have faltered. The biggest obstacle is getting the consumer aware of the code and to also download the app.

About Paystik

The company of New Stanford is a three-person operation based in Stanford Venture Studio at the Graduate School of Business. At the present time, the company is bootstrapped, meaning they have no outside investment. Ioannidis is a former program manager with Microsoft.

Hosts can share their network and password details with the quick scan of a barcode.

Among the most commonly requested pieces of information from hosts by their guests is the network name and password so that they can access the wireless internet, and QR codes have now been discovered as an ideal solution to this request in one simple scan.

A new mobile trend has arrived, in which hosts have been framing the barcodes and hanging them.

These unique QR codes have been pre-designed in order to allow party and house guests to be able to simply scan them in order to gain access to the wireless internet in the home. This is proving to be both convenient and practical in today’s society where people feel the need to be connected at every moment.

These QR codes are hung in frames that can be scanned by guests so that they can obtain the data they need.

The trick to taking advantage of these QR codes at a party is to hang them prominently in one of the main areas of the home, and to display them in spaces where guests have a tendency of stepping aside in order to check something online or reply to their emails. Before this option, guests were required to ask their hosts for the login information; a process that could be rather frustrating.

As today’s network passwords need to be rather complex, they are often combinations of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols, and they may or may not use any recognizable words. This can make the exchange of the information rather time consuming and impractical. However, when all it takes is a scan of QR codes, it simplifies the process immediately.

This trend was started by a single person, who posted their successes online. It caught on quickly over the holiday season until it became much more common to see them at the Christmas and New Year celebrations and other parties that were happening at that time of year. It didn’t take long for smartphone users to catch on and start scanning the QR codes to receive the connection they needed.