An evening with Microsoft Tag reader

Microsoft's officially launched their "TAG" application on May 27th 2010. I had a free evening that day and thought I should try it out, you know, just to see how the stuff works. I kinda liked the appz. So here's how it all began.


7:00pm - in front of my PC
I navigated to Microsoft Tag homepage and I was required to login with my live account before i could play around with the tag creator. Upon logging in, i was taken to a really neat layout that had three simple functions, create, track or edit Tags. Nice!

7:10pm - setting up my windows mobile
You need a reader + internet connection to be able to read the tag informations as all data is relayed from their servers. After going through a few "about tag" pages on their website, i bumped on to the reader...Atlast! I got the *.cab file and proceeded to install it. It was around 300kb, so it was all done in a jiffy.

7:12pm - Creating the tag
Creation of tag was pretty straightforward and simple, so i created this test tag to see if it works the way it claims. I clicked on create, and the wizard asked me a couple of questions like a title to the tag, a link or text, and the type of layout i wanted. After keying out the info, it took a couple of seconds and suggested me to print it out. I opted to save my tag as a Jpeg, as this is a test tag, just for sake of convenience and green environment! ;)

7:15pm - Tag! You are mine!
I fired up Tag reader on my windows mobile 6.1 (yes its kinda outdated) and it asked me approve a set of EULA agreements. The appz initiated my camera mobile along with a onscreen cross mark that said requested me to point at any tag image. I pointed it at the jpeg that i created few minutes earlier. For a few seconds nothing seemed to happened as there was no status indicator. I thought it might have been buggy and as i was about to take away my phone from the tag image, suddenly a msg poped up quoting "Tag scanned successfully" and executed the function i embeded in it. I actually had it say "Success, your appz reads tag" ;)
 I had my pocket pc connected to wifi network at my place so the whole process was lot faster than our Indian GPRS networks ;)

I am starting to like this tag application. I took a print out of couple of tag images and stuck them as notes all over my desk! lol it was fun.
Could have some true potential but I'm not sure how far would this go in terms of productivity. We gotta wait and see!

7:30pm - some wicked ideas creep into my mind 
I googled for some tag images made by others and woah, loads showed up! I am gonna go on tag scanning spree to see what info they hold!!  


Click here to see if you mobile reads microsoft Tag images. As a prerequisite, you should have the tag reader installed in your mobile. You can get it here. All major mobile OSes are supported.

And here's the tag to madzindia blog. If you feel generous, just take a print out of this one and stick it as a note in your desks ;)

Update: Consolidated tutorial on using Microsoft Tag

* Visit http://tag.microsoft.com and login to your live account.
* Click on create a tag on your dashboard
* Key in required details (sample below)

*create and render them in any format you see fit
*You are all set! Have fun and spread the word!