NEW YORK—The square barcodes that are popping up in advertisements, product packaging, hand bills, and just about anywhere you can imagine will now appear on notices put up by the Department of Buildings (DOB).
Quick Response (QR) codes are an electronic portal to more specific information an interested consumer—or in this case, city residents—might want to know. A shoe store advertisement might pique someone’s interest on the subway. With a quick scan of the QR code, the smartphone user is browsing through loafers or high tops in no time.
Now, when a building is under construction, the permits posted on the job site will carry a QR code and all the information New Yorkers might want to know, and more, will be right at their fingertips.
The smartphone apps that reads QR codes are free to download, and will allow New Yorkers to discover the history and the future of a building: the scope of a building project, the developers involved, the property owner, other associated projects, complaints and violations related to the building, and more.
“I’m sure many of you who follow the Buildings Department and want to know what’s going on in the city are already on the Web and you already know how to crawl through it and get the information.
The average New Yorker probably doesn’t do that everyday,” observed Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri at a press conference at the New York Information Technology Center in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday.
With 1 million hits a day on the DOB website, Buildings information is already a hot commodity. This new technology might open it up to others who never thought to look for it.
Quick Response (QR) codes are an electronic portal to more specific information an interested consumer—or in this case, city residents—might want to know. A shoe store advertisement might pique someone’s interest on the subway. With a quick scan of the QR code, the smartphone user is browsing through loafers or high tops in no time.
Now, when a building is under construction, the permits posted on the job site will carry a QR code and all the information New Yorkers might want to know, and more, will be right at their fingertips.
The smartphone apps that reads QR codes are free to download, and will allow New Yorkers to discover the history and the future of a building: the scope of a building project, the developers involved, the property owner, other associated projects, complaints and violations related to the building, and more.
“I’m sure many of you who follow the Buildings Department and want to know what’s going on in the city are already on the Web and you already know how to crawl through it and get the information.
The average New Yorker probably doesn’t do that everyday,” observed Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri at a press conference at the New York Information Technology Center in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday.
With 1 million hits a day on the DOB website, Buildings information is already a hot commodity. This new technology might open it up to others who never thought to look for it.
All of this data is already available to the public on the DOB website, but in this information age, how many people know how to sift through it all to find what they need? The QR codes make the data more accessible.
The project is part of the Simplicity plan introduced by Mayor Michael Bloomberg last month. He describes it as a “comprehensive initiative to make government smarter, more efficient, and more consumer-friendly.”
The DOB codes are a sort of pilot project. Once they work out any bugs, or make adjustments according to how New Yorkers use them, or would prefer to use them, QR codes will pop up more and more around town says Bloomberg.
“Once you get it going, it’s easy to add other things,” he noted. QR codes are already used on the Staten Island Ferry. Riders can watch a video clip on their smartphones on interesting attractions in New York City. On Department of Sanitation vehicles, a QR code takes users to a video on recycling.
The project is part of the Simplicity plan introduced by Mayor Michael Bloomberg last month. He describes it as a “comprehensive initiative to make government smarter, more efficient, and more consumer-friendly.”
The DOB codes are a sort of pilot project. Once they work out any bugs, or make adjustments according to how New Yorkers use them, or would prefer to use them, QR codes will pop up more and more around town says Bloomberg.
“Once you get it going, it’s easy to add other things,” he noted. QR codes are already used on the Staten Island Ferry. Riders can watch a video clip on their smartphones on interesting attractions in New York City. On Department of Sanitation vehicles, a QR code takes users to a video on recycling.
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