>> QR codes, it turns out, were just ahead of their time. No they weren't, they were given a bad reputation because their use in ad campaigns, where they were

>> QR codes, it turns out, were just ahead of their time. No they weren't, they were given a bad reputation because their use in ad campaigns, where they were exclusively deployed as a tool to con people into actively viewing more ads, dwarfed other uses in both number and visibility to the average person. Google did exactly the same thing to the reputation of its own product (Glass) in a similar way - by trying to convince people that it was going to be something that everyone was going to wear all the time. It makes sense that they're becoming more popular now that they're not being used in ads so much anymore, and instead being used for games and other features that actually do things users want to do.