The stickers in detail
The stickers are the most visible part of the project. They contain a lot of the functionality and should be flashy so that people who are passing by a location immediately see them.
By the way: Stickers are great and flashy. But in certain use-cases, you do not have to have them. Take a look at asphaltart.at, a German speaking site or you can also use geo-fences with our plugin. More on this feature soon.
- Label: The sticker itself should be a plastic label. This is not only better suited for outside (weather proof) but also easier to remove at the end of the project.
- NFC-location: The German sentence "Handy hier auflegen" has a double meaning. It could mean "place your phone here" or "stop talking on the phone". Whatever slogan you use make sure to attract the users. We placed the NFC-tag behind the "X".
- Label ID: You will probably be dealing with hundreds of stickers that need to be put on a certain location. For not mixing them up, we gave them an ID. Next to the ID we put the name of the photographer of the image of Ingeborg Bachmann. His daughter gave us therefore the permission to use the photograph.
- Simple icons: You can use those provided in the sample layout or use your own ones. They should make it obvious for the user what to do.
- QR-code: each and every site has its own URL and QR-code. You do not have to use a special service to generate them, our Wordpress-plugin will generate them. Just copy and paste them later into your layout.
- Sponsor's logo: If your whole project is being sponsored, you can use this space here. We did not get any money from this company, it provided us with public space. We put the logo on in order to signal their employees not to remove the stickers from the bus stops.
We use labels (Avery L4774) that you can get at any office supply store or at Amazon (Amazon). Our labels can be printed with a laser printer or copy machine from any copy shop. It turned out that you cannot print them on a cheap color laser printer (in our case: Samsung CLP-320).
But copying them at professionals is better and not so expensive anyway. The cost is also very low: 80 stickers cost around 25 Euro, printing the stickers on them will cost another 20 to 30 Euro.
Currently we are using copyrighted fonts though we are already looking out for fonts that are licensed under open source. Soon we will provide you with all the layout templates that can be used.
Of course: Every QR-code and NFC-tag needs an URL that tells the browser to open a certain website. To reduce complexity you can use only a single URL for all QR-codes and NFC-tags, thus reducing the functionality of the whole system as well. For this purpose you do not need our plugin at all. Everything points to a single Wordpress-page whose content you change from time to time.
Here is our way of doing it:
Explanation: Every QR-code and NFC-tag has its own URL that is tied to a certain sticker on a certain location. When someone scans the QR-code at Location X, the plugin recognizes that and forwards the browser to this week's content for that specific location. The same happens for an NFC-tag.
Although we have the same content on all 100 stickers, the plugin know what was downloaded on which place with a certain technology. The plugin uses this data to generate heatmaps or charts and send tweets. See for example our stats page.
You might also ask why we use such random URLs. This should prevent someone from memorizing the URL, people should be forced to go to the stickers every week. The URL on the QR-code and NFC-tag quickly changes to the URL of the specific content.
URLs for content change every week.
Don't worry! Setting that up is relatively easy.
Since each sticker has its own URL on the QR-code, you cannot print all stickers from one master. But the good news is: The plugin generates all the QR-codes for you.
In order to generate these fuzzy URLs, just choose "QR", press "random url" and then "add". The word "QR" gets highlighted as a hyperlink. Pressing on it, opens the QR-code which you can save by right-clicking on it and choose "save graphic as" or even easier: press "copy graphic" and then "paste graphic" in InDesign.
By the way: The QR-codes direct the user to a certain website. This is unfortunately also a weak point. Someone could fake your stickers (or just the QR-part of it) and redirect the user somewhere else - even to a place with malicious software. Though this risk is very low as lots of work is tied to it, we want to tell you about it.
The easiest way for the user to access the content is with NFC. An NFC-tag is a tiny chip with a giant antenna. It holds only very little information - in this case a text symbolizing a URL (e.g. http://pingeb.org/79x3f3). All the energy comes from the smartphone, so you do not have to worry about batteries.
NFC-tags are standardized, so every tag you buy could be used for the project. Typically the tag comes in a round shaped sticker. Buying the NFC-tags is the most expensive part of the project. The XDA forum has a pretty long list of vendors from around the world. Some vendors on Amazon are selling them too. For higher quantities, we got recommendations for Rapid NFC, UK and TagAge, Finnland.
The prices vary a lot: Bought in large volumes, they can be as cheap as 50 Cent, in small quantities they can cost up to 2 Euro.
The electronic is quite durable. Prior to the start of the project we tested one sticker for two months. Rain, thunderstorms and varying temperatures did not do any harm to the tag.
Attention: Not all NFC-tags work on every surface. If you want to apply them on metal (e.g. street lights), you have to use special "on metal" tags! They are more pricy - calculate plus 50 percent - and harder to get.
The cool thing about NFC is that you can write your own tags. And the more you "play" with NFC, you see more and more cool usage models. All you need to write an NFC-tag is an NFC-capable smartphone running Android.
- Be sure that your phone is NFC-capable and that it is enabled.
- In Google's Play Store you will find several apps that write NFC-tags. We recommend you NFC task launcher. It is free and does everything you need.
- Once you open the app, choose "New Tag/Neues Tag"
- All kinds of different information can be written on an NFC tag. In our case, choose "New URL/Neue URL".
- Write the URL of the specific location that the plugin tells you and press "Write URL as tag/URL als Tag erstellen".
- Be sure that "Read only/Schreibschutz" is enabled. This ensures you that no one else can change the URL stored on the tag. Finally: Just touch the tag to the back of the phone.
Done! You are all set.
After having saved the URL on the NFC-tag, write the Label-ID on the back of it.
We put the sticker and the NFC-tag together using a paperclip and packaged both in an envelope for distribution. The envelope had the ID on plus the location name on it.
I know this is "very German" though it saves you a lot of time and helps you to prevent misallocated stickers.
Congratulations! You are now ready to deploy your project!