Putting a bar code on places, not just products - NYTimes.com

If you walk past the gift shop of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles, or Cheeseburger Baby in Miami, the chances are that you will see a sticker in the window that has a Google Maps logo and a one-inch-square with a series of pixelated black-and-white cubes called a QR Code.

In the coming weeks, Google plans to send out 100,000 of these stickers, each with their own QR code, to a new demographic of businesses Google is calling “Favorite Places”. These favorites are based on search results from users interacting with local business listings on Google Maps...