Following the release of Microsoft Tag today, I got pondering with the idea of ‘real-life information tagging,’ and came up with this. I have no idea what kind of underlying technology Tag uses, but I thought this one has potential if someone can do it (unfortunately, I’m busy running a company and a diary, otherwise I would). I’ve tried to present it in as practical terms as possible.

Get a list of the top 500 restaurants in the world. Get their menus. Double-encrypt those menus so that you have a 128-bit key, and somehow turn it into a barcode (so each unique barcode refers to an encryption key, and that encryption key to a restaurant menu). Make a Yellow-pages like hard-copy directory of those 500 restaurants — organized by place, alphabetically, ranking, etc. — and beside each restaurant, have the barcode.

Now make a device which is able to read these barcodes and get the underlying encryption key. Make software so that you have a list of each restaurant, its encryption key, and its menu. Whenever that device scans a barcode, the scanner spits out the encryption key, which is queried with the internal database and the restaurant menu is presented on screen. Instantly.

Note 1: “Device” can refer to “iPhone app”.
Note 2: The restaurants thing is just an example. This can be done with places, names, and basically anything which has a real life-application where there is demand for a hard-copy “directory” because it’s too inconvenient to carry the web with you.
Note 3: The database doesn’t have to live on the ‘device’ itself. It can be stored on the web and queried back-and-forth.

Thoughts? E-mail or Tumblr reblog.