Microsoft announced today on the MSDN Blogs that its High Capacity Color Barcode [HCCB] technology “Tag” is no longer in beta stage anymore, and has graduated to version 1.0. The company states that ever since Microsoft Tag was originally launched as a public beta 18 months ago, there have been more than 1 billion Tags printed by businesses. Just in April alone, 20 million magazines in the U.S. used Microsoft tags, states the company.
To celebrate this milestone, the Redmond-based company has updated the Microsoft Tag website and the Tag Campaign Manager. They have also improved the official Tag Reader clients. The company has also introduced quite a few new features.
According to the company, the new features are:
- A device ID feature will allow marketers to deliver a more personalized consumer experience across multiple Tags. For example, consumers can now receive customized content, such as a coupon or other offer from a retail outlet, based on Tags they’ve previously scanned
- A new .tag file format will make it easier to print and manage a large number of different Tags as part of a broad campaign deployment. Developers of professional printing programs can now generate the Tag graphic on the fly as part of their solution
- Tag has always been available worldwide and has been distributed and deployed globally. We have added localization in five new languages which include: French, Spanish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Italian
- And finally, we will be introducing a beta Heat Map feature in the next few days, available in the Tag Campaign Manager, that will help companies better measure Tag usage by location and make more informed decisions about their Tag campaigns and overall marketing spend
Microsoft has also created a new logo to celebrate the first stable version of the product. Microsoft Tag is somewhat similar to QR Codes. However, both technologies differ from each other in several aspects. For instance, you can’t store data on Microsoft Tags, just specific IDs that redirect users to Microsoft servers. The benefit of this is that Tags can carry more data that QR Codes without actually carrying all these information.
You can create a Microsoft Tag at Tag.Microsoft.com.