TAG requires an internet connection to function but. In many cases TAG information is returned from the internet by the time you are able to focus and capture a QR Code and even when both readers are using active mode. (Active-mode readers use a camera's video stream and test each frame as opposed to passive-mode, where you must take a picture first and then pass it to the reader.)

The TAG reader is exceptionally fast but since all TAGs are the same size relative to one another they are easier to capture and decrypt, resulting in blazingly fast performance. In many cases, you have to spend a lot of time focusing in on QR Codes to get the readers to work. Functionality is the biggest contributor to user experience and here TAG the clear advantage.

Don't take my word for it. Test it yourself but instead of holding your phone still, move it back and forth across the screen. And try it with our smallest TAG - the one shown above. Don not stop and do not try to focus, just keep moving closer and closer until it reads the TAG.

Even better, increase your screen size by about 500% making the TAG much larger. Then start from several feet away and as you move your phone closer to the screen, twist or rotate the phone back and forth. The test here is to see how fast you have to twist and turn, in order not to read the TAG. Be careful, if you slow down too much it will be too easy.

The size of TAG above on the actual business card is 3/4" x 3/4". And if you were to scan it you would find just what you'd expect - contact information but no rule says that's what the TAG needs to point to.

Over 30 years ago, George Cohan, the CEO of McDonald's Canada gave out business cards that were redeemable for a Big Mac. So who's to say what your code does. It all depends on what you want people to do with it. In fact, business cards are such a convenient size they could have any purpose.

It certainly isn't all about aesthetics but it is immediately clear that custom TAGs will be a big part of the market and they look good too. Although you can still tell it's a TAG, in some circumstances you should be able to blend such TAGs right into your document.

And here is a TAG that is almost completely void of clues that is a TAG.

Not to take anything away from the effort that companies like 3G Vision and NTT DoCoMo have put into making 2D barcodes a mainstream technology BUT they've been at it for 7 years. In all that time, they have yet to move away from the "click a code - go to a web page" mentality. And yet there is so much more.

If Microsoft has learned anything in three decades, it is developers, developers, developers. TAG is starting life with developers in mind right out of the box. Why? Because the demand for TAG solutions will outpace everything a single company can provide and because the breadth of applications demands effort across multiple disciplines.

There are an estimated 4 million developers programming on one windows platform or another. Given that the current development tools make the transition to mobile painless, means that, there can be 4 million TAG developers available inside a year.

This TAG actually returns a single character, lowercase "a". By itself that's not really much use unless it formed some part of a word game or puzzle or perhaps a contest but it's mainly shown to make a comparison with the TAG below.

Now this TAG will return 990 characters, about the biggest we could create with our tools right now. It doesn't look that much different from the single character TAG above. They are the same size and a TAG that returned a million characters would not be any bigger. You may never have a reason to do this but applications that want to use this functionality in TAG certainly do.

To highlight the point, open the 1000 character QR Code to the right. It has 1000 "a's" but you will have to take our word for it since none of the phone readers can read it.