NEW YORK (AP) — After years of chronicling the derring-do of entrepreneurs, Forbes magazine is taking a little gamble of its own this week. It's partnering with a technology startup to test a novel way of bridging print media with the Internet.
Forbes is mailing out free handheld digital readers to all 810,000 of its subscribers to see if they'll take to the idea of jumping around the Net by scanning little bar codes in ads and stories.
It's the first major rollout of a technology from a Dallas-based company called Digital Convergence, which also has deals in place to use the system this fall in several newspapers, the Kaplan test-preparation courses and Wired magazine.
Jim Berrien, the president of Forbes magazine, says he's already recouped the $2 million it cost to mail out the scanners in the extra ads bought by companies curious about trying out the new technology. The codes will start appearing in Forbes' "Best of the Web" issue dated Sept. 11 and continue indefinitely.
The Forbes experiment is certainly large-scale, but it's not the first time companies have tried to get old media to link up with the new.
This summer, Popular Mechanics and Wired have been running ads using a competing technology from Digimarc, a company that makes secure watermarks for passports and currencies. And there are other efforts under way to get different Internet-enabled scanners into the marketplace.
Digital Convergence appears to have an early lead, though, in getting its "digital cues" out to the public and sealing deals with different media outlets to use its codes.
A company set up by Motorola and Symbol Technologies, the leading maker of supermarket bar code scanners, is working on a similar kind of technology but so far it has no deals with newspapers or magazines — and the readers won't be in wide circulation until next year.
Still, all these companies are counting on consumers warming to the idea of welcoming yet another gadget — tethered to their computer, no less — into their lives.
"Any technology that requires people to relate differently to media is a challenge," says Dan O'Brien, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Their success depends on a change in user behavior. They're both counting that people will want to take their magazine and hold it up to a camera or bar code scanner. It's a big leap."
The bar codes used by Digital Convergence look a little like the UPC codes found on many store goods, but skinnier and slanted. A miniature reader, called a "CueCat" for its feline shape, plugs into the back of the PC, sharing an outlet with the keyboard.
Once the code is scanned in, the PC's Web browser jumps to the specified page.
Digimarc uses barely perceptible patterns on the page of a magazine to encode its data. The patterns are difficult to see with the naked eye, but a computer can read them if the magazine is held up to a Web camera, the kind that are mounted on the top of PC monitors and mostly retail for a little more than $100.
A special "D" logo on the bottom of the page alerts readers that it's embedded with the Digimarc code.
Digimarc president Bruce Davis is counting on more and more PC users having Web cams at home. He estimates there are 3 to 4 million in use now, and 5 million expected to be sold next year.
SmartMoney magazine started using the technology in its latest issue, and a handful of other magazines have also signed up, but Davis won't disclose other pending deals.
Davis acknowledges the challenge of getting consumers to adopt his technology, but he notes that Digimarc has two distinct advantages over bar codes: they're unobtrusive and don't require a separate input device.
For advertisers, the idea has a clear appeal by directing Web surfers to the exact place they want them to be on their corporate Web site: frequently, the checkout line.
And given the explosive growth in the Internet, O'Brien, Forrester analyst, believes that the goal of simplifying Web addressing is sound.
"As the Web continues to double in size every 110 days or whatever it is, it will be important to help people filter through the noise," O'Brien said. "Not everybody has the patience to type through a lengthy URL."