Using a camera phone to read two-dimensional bar codes has been a mainstay of the mobile scene in Japan for a few years. Japanese consumers point their cameras at codes printed in advertising to automatically surf to an advertiser's Web site in their WAP browsers or dial a contact center.

Now, as we saw in parts one and two of this multi-part series, mobile 2D visual code reading has opened a beachhead in the U.S. ScanBuy Inc. launched a trial earlier this year in San Francisco, using slightly different technology than the Japanese QR (Quick Response) codes and a different advertiser-pays business model.

Will North American consumers take to mobile visual code reading the way the Japanese did? And if so, how long will it take the market to evolve here?

It's a long way from a foregone conclusion, we believe. For starters, it's not clear that advertisers will buy into the ScanBuy value proposition - that by mediating the code reading transaction it can help advertisers connect more easily with mobile customers and provide them with valuable information about who and where those customers are.

Michael Liard, a research director at Allied Business Intelligence Inc. (ABI Research), believes the Japanese have probably blazed a trail that North Americans will eventually follow. But he also points out that other mobile add-in technologies - notably, near-field communications (NFC), an RFID technology being trialed for applications such as contactless point-of-sale payment - may give 2D bar coding a run for its money.

And Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing at Gartner, notes that the U.S. is a more market-driven and less cohesive environment than Japan and it may be more difficult here to create the critical mass of users needed to make it worth the while of advertisers and other information providers to participate.

Vendors, needless to say, are bullish.

ScanBuy CEO Jonathan Bulkeley points out that his company has already launched services in Spain with Telefonica, with TDC in Denmark and Vivo in Brazil. Bulkeley says the company is in discussions with "most of the major carriers" in the U.S. and is in the process of developing projects in several other countries. He expects to announce eight to 10 new deployments in 2008.

"It's not, 'Is it going to happen?' anymore," Bulkeley says. "It's just a matter of when." He admits that a year ago he might have said the answer was four years from now, but he's much more optimistic today. He feels the technology and the concept will start to get "real traction" in all the markets where ScanBuy is active within the next six to 18 months.

We'll see.

In the meantime, ScanBuy is by no means the only North American company exploring the possibilities of mobile visual code scanning. And there may be other uses for the technology than the simple consumer advertising applications ScanBuy is pursuing and that dominate the Japanese experience.