I received an offer to publish ads through a tourist agency. Nothing unusual there, but they did have a new service that I had never seen offered before. Below is a quote from the agencies marketing literature. (I am not going to mention the agency’s name to protect the non-technical in their marketing department.)

Mobile Tag

Half and Full Page advertisers: link your ad to a mobile tag and instantly interact with our readers! Use this platform to transform and promote your unique offer, incentive or feature.

What is a Mobile Tag?

Microsoft Mobile Tags are small, colorful codes that connect your print ad to the digital world. Users with Internet-enabled camera phones can simply snap the Tag on your ad and instantly receive additional information about your product. Reporting is available 24/7 to track the number of scans your tag is receiving!

Microsoft has done it again. Despite dozens of different organizations coming together to create an open source and/or free option with QR codes, Microsoft ignores the standards and creates their own version that is free-for-now but exclusively owned by them. Travelers to Asia and Europe are already familiar with “mobile tags”, better known to geeks as QR codes. These codes are being heavily pushed by Google with the Android OS.

As Allen Stern points out, the biggest problems with Microsoft’s Mobile Tags, besides ignoring what the rest of the industry is already doing, is that it transforms the 2D QR-code-like grid into a colorful mess of triangles. While the QR code can be easily printed in black and white, the red, yellow and green triangles of Microsoft’s mess will require 4-color printing. This is no small deal for companies since it represents an increase in cost.

Google has announced the winners of its Android Developer Competition 2. Check out the winning apps. For the Android developers reading this post, start planning your next Android apps!

Several carriers and in-flight WiFi companies are promoting their “Internet in a plane” service. Even Google is getting onboard (pun intended) by sponsoring free WiFi over the holiday travel season within airports and has inked a deal with Virgin American to provide free WiFi on their flights. Of course, Google has deep pockets and makes money when people use the Internet. The deal has the added benefit that they get to advertise with new Chrome browser. But besides Google, can anyone really afford in-flight WiFi?

As reported by Portolio.com, it costs between $100K to $250K to equip just one plane with the equipment needed for in-flight WiFi. To equip an entire airline of hundreds of planes requires more upfront cash than these in-flight WiFi startup companies have and can possibly raise. (Brother, can you spare a quarter billion?)

The biggest problem is that users have been conditioned to expect the Internet for free. (I often joke that “Internet” is Latin for free.) They don’t even want to pay $1 for this service. And even if they would pay $10 per session, a huge sum for most bargain travelers, it would require 10k to 25k customers on a single plane just to pay for the equipment costs for that plane. This does not even include the cost of maintaining the system over time.

It will require years just to get the upfront costs back. How can these in-flight WiFi companies really afford this? But more importantly, is this just too soon for this service? Should we wait for equipment costs to come down more as users become more connected? I am sure that there are other ways to invest this quarter billion that can get a higher and faster return for their investors and a better social return for the world.

Google has stepped up and responed to developers’s complaints about the format of app descriptions on the Android Market. As discussed before, the current dexcriptions from developers are limited by a few hundred words. Google is planning to add more descriptions and photos to help developers maket their apps. It will be a welcome change.

Google held the GTUG Campout, its first hackathon that focused on Google Wave. The programming teams were not restricted to Wave but also included several entries using Google’s Android OS.

Geogad was there and took part in a Wave project called “Trippy”, which is a Google Wave robot to help groups collaborate on trip planning. You can add it to any Google Wave by accessing trip-bot@appspot.com.

The weekend was a great way to get an intro to Google Wave and what it can do now and in the future. The overall impression from working on the Trippy robot is that Google Wave is rightly a developer only version for now. It is still missing several important pieces. Some of the biggest missing pieces are

1. Since there is no leader in a Wave, all participants are equal. This can be both good and bad.

2. No one has the ability to remove a participant after they have been added. This includes robot participants.

3. Wave cannot connect to external devices.

4. Wave gadgets and robots must reside on Google AppEngine, and the AppEngine still has some shortcomings. For example, in the Trippy robot, we planned and coded a version that accessed flight and hotel info from Kayak.com’s API. It worked locally but did not work on the AppEngine server because it had issues with accessing cookies properly. The Kayak API depends on cookies. As a result, the version of Trippy that was presented lacked this important feature.

The overall view of Google Wave is that there is a great deal of power under the hood, but it will need to be refined to make an impact with regular users.