Microsoft Tag can provide the iPad with even greater utility

First, the new Apple iPad is perhaps the finest example of technological consolidation that we have seen in quite some time and although it is a perfect fit for countless people, in so many ways and on so many levels, we still think they got the form-factor wrong. As it turns out, this could be a good thing if it means that the iPad could be followed by a little baby brother. That said, the exclusion of a camera is a design decision that needs to be reviewed, if for no other reason than support Microsoft Tag.

We introduced another piece of Microsoft Tag utility in our Accelerators for IE8 to showcase transferring information from a PC to a mobile device. Often, you come across something on your desktop that you want to take with you and generating a Tag to facilitate the transfer makes it easy.

Similarly, in our LunaTagGEN for Mobile, we demonstrate transferring information, such as contacts and messages, from one mobile device to another. Microsoft Tag can reduce this otherwise complex task into a couple of clicks and a snap.

Even though there are electronic ways to transfer information, they require setup and confirmation and authentication and authorization and… and that is just to transfer to someone you know. What about a casual acquaintance or those cases where the activity is a disposable event; something you might only ever do once and certainly not worth the time and effort to create an electronic link.

So the easiest way to pass information from one device to any another, without any physical connection is by using a Tag. You could think of it as the safe-sex method of data transfer, since there are no visual viruses; at least not yet. Right now, these transfers are limited to data types applicable to mobile phones, like contacts, phone numbers and text but there is no reason not to extend the technology to encompass additional types.

Why Microsoft Tag and not QR Codes? There are a number of pages elsewhere on this site to help you decide for yourself; however, fundamentally it comes down to this: Tag by its nature and design is a reference, whereas QR Codes are based on text. Using a QR Code means that for whatever you want to transfer, a code is created on the device; which works fine for phone numbers and small amounts of data but what if you want to transfer a picture or some video. That would take a very large QR Code.

So can’t a QR Code also act as a reference? Of course it can but only when the subject is predetermined and the associated services are in place to accomplish the transfer. When a QR Code contains a link to a web page, it is acting as a reference but the page already exists. For a QR Code to act as the proxy to transfer a photograph, there would need to be a service out on the internet to facilitate that task or the photograph would need to exist there already.

The point is that QR Codes could, while Microsoft Tag already is that service, insofar as each Tag created is already a reference to some data. All Microsoft needs to do is add an additional data type to store pictures or video or anything and everything. And storage need only persist for a few seconds or minutes; just the amount time required to accomplish the transfer. The disposability of the Tag and associated data make it a perfect fit for the elasticity of cloud computing with Microsoft Azure.

So our suggestion to Apple is: make a companion to your iPad; make it a little smaller and add a camera, so that we can utilize Microsoft Tag. Oh, but wait, while you are at it, if you put the camera lens on the front of the device, then calls could be video calls, and if, and, and…