There are many fascinating new technologies that come along, and you never know which will take off. The QR (“quick response”) codes — those square digitized boxes that load website URLs when you take a picture of them with a QR compatible cell phone or smartphone — got quite popular in Japan around 2002-2003, yet no one knew what the mysterious squares were outside Japan. Now QR codes are growing in popularity in the U.S., so much that we added them to the wacky J-List Anime Glasses you get for free when you order from our site. Another very useful technology is RSS (“Really Simple syndication”), a system that allows you to read articles from your favorite websites in a convenient reader like Google Reader or many apps for iPhone, Android and so on. (J-List’s site has outstanding RSS support too, allow you to watch specific categories for new products, make RSS feeds using keywords, and so on — click here to see the full list of RSS feeds available.) RSS is one technology I’d really love to see Japanese websites embrace. It’s so much work to keep up with new offerings from our suppliers, visually checking for updates to their websites or (ulp) reading the faxes they send announcing new products coming for preorder, when publishing via RSS would let us get all the information in one convenient place.
