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There’s a new hip barcode on the market, and if you haven’t seen one yet, you soon will, of course we’re talking about QR codes (Quick Response codes) those strange looking square black and white pattered boxes.

Although they are only starting to become popular here in the UK, QR codes have actually been around since 1994 and have been common in Japan and South Korea since then, initially created by Toyota as a way of tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing, they are now used in a much broader context aimed at mobile phone users.

We’ve noticed a stronger push to use the technology, with an array of magazines and TV campaigns taking advantage of it, but exactly how is it beneficial to you or your customers?

The main reason why it’s becoming popular is that it bridges a gap between the printed and digital world. When you want a customer to land on a very specific website address and you’ve got a limited space to insert that URL, or the URL is way too long for people to re-type or remember, QR codes can be used to convert that into a scannable graphic.

Customers can then pull out their mobile phone and with any QR code mobile app quickly scan the barcode and be instantly pushed to the website address without having to re-type or remember anything.

Many of the mobile platforms on the market support QR codes natively including Google Android, BlackBerry and Nokia, and for iOS (iPod, iPhone, iPad) users their is a multitude of apps available to download that support the scanning of QR codes.

There’s so much more you can do with QR codes, and we’ve got some great ideas on how to enhance what they currently do, so if you’ve got an idea for a mobile application, or your business needs to make better use of this technology get in touch.

There’s a wide choice of platforms like Apple (iOS), Google (Android), RIM (BlackBerry) in the mobile industry, and if you’re serious about the success of your app, then you need to saturate the market by launching your app across multiple platforms.

Without going too deep into the technical details, there’s a few reasons why developing across multiple platforms can present problems, each one differs in style and often language which means if you want to develop an app for iOS, Android and BlackBerry there’s a high chance you’ll be charged the full development cost three times.

When we were researching how to position our business as a leading mobile app development company we knew that there must be a better solution, and after some considerable research we’ve identified cutting edge technology that allows us to write native apps cheaper, better and faster than using each platforms tools directly.

After continued research and trailing of their solution we’ve partnered with Appcelerator to take advantage of their Titanium product which allows us to develop native mobile apps using a high-level programming language called JavaScript, because we’re using the same language across all currently supported platforms we’re able to develop the core functionality of your mobile application once and then refine it on a per-platform basis.

Ensuring our offering to customers was the very best we’ve invested a chunk of time into learning their technology and as soon as they announced a certification programme we took the exam straight away and have now got Titanium Certified Application Developers on our team.

Standardising your mobile app’s on Appcelerator Titanium is not only advantageous for getting apps to market quicker and cheaper, but also because as Appcelerator continues to develop their tools, they will respond to developer demand and bring in support for additional platforms, and as mentioned before, code that has been developed will already be supported.

Although Titanium allows us to re-use code across platforms, it’s important that each application delivered on a platform looks and feels like other native applications, for example if you’re a Android user you wouldn’t expect nor want applications to look like they were iPhone apps, so we re-evaluate the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) on a per platform basis.

Our ability to develop across platform’s makes us stand out amongst our competitors and our integrated partnership with Appcelerator allows us to offer the highest level of support.

FuelStop is a simple and quick application to use, whether you’ve got one vehicle or a fleet of vehicles FuelStop can help you manage and improve your fuel consumption, track your fuel usage in 2 simple steps with minimal time.

We released the application on the 19th of February 2011 and started a strategic marketing campaign to try to push the application up the rankings, yesterday (3rd March 2011) our app finally broke into the top 10 apps in finance. FuelStop is now ranked 4th among top paid apps, 12th among the top grossing apps and 5th in new & noteworthy in that category.

We’re really happy that our marketing efforts have propelled our application from 249th to 4th in less than 48 hours, and we’re also currently shown as the 12th top grossing application. We’re continuing to push our application and we’re confident that we can improve these positions.

If you’d like to download our application, or read more about it, then please visit iTunes using the following website address:

goo.gl/0MX8n