It allows you to bring traditionally offline objects online, by embedding digital content into your brand’s barcodes. You can embed all kinds of things: pictures, funny anecdotes, customer reviews, coupons or brand stories.

For a demonstration of how it works, download the free app here and scan the barcode below.

You can give anything a story.

How can your brand benefit from this technology? While the applications to travel, tourism and news based brands are the fairly obvious, there really is an opportunity here for any brand. As long as there is a consistent voice and an identity, your brand can have an opinion, anecdote or suggestion for just about anything. Recommend a restaurant that shares your brand’s taste for the exotic. Show your customers you care by sending get well wishes when they check in at the doctor’s office.

As is often the case with new technology, the true possibilities have yet to be imagined.

And we’re not talking about the kind of I-trust-you-not-to-fuck-this-up but positive trust as in I trust you with my money, my reputation, my vote, my future.

If we applied the same standards to our professional relationships we do to our personal ones, then trust would be sacrosanct. Because once it’s broken, it’s incredibly difficult to rebuild. After all, if you can’t trust your husband, you pick up the phone to your lawyer. If your friends can’t trust you to show up to dinner, the invitations dry up.

Trust should be inviolable yet it is frequently tossed away in the most casual way.

A lot of liberal folks liked John McCain until he said there was no other reason for Palin’s appointment other than she was the most qualified person for the job. In the UK, Gordon Brown lost the trust of the electorate when he transparently lied about his motives for not calling an early election. Apple are in danger of losing it by releasing a substandard product in the iPhone 3g. Microsoft had it but jettisoned it – and their ability to innovate – in an effort to take over the world.

And we are currently placing the future of all commerce and communications in a network that can’t be trusted to deliver a reliable answer to a simple question. You can’t trust online reviewers. You can’t trust the gossip-cum-news outlets. You can’t separate the wise from the cranks.

“Who can we trust?’ is not the voice of the paranoid anymore. It’s the Cri de Coeur of everyone.

Today a brand is the collaboration of a company and its consumers. It belongs to both in equal parts. The more you can do to foster that collaboration, the more successful you’ll be.