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News In Brief

MIDDAY UPDATE: Larry Page to lead Google, QR codes

Katharine Crnko Jan 21, 2011

Google surprised Wall Street and Silicon Valley yesterday with the news that co-founder Larry Page will take over as the company’s new CEO. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on his Twitter “Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!” This has been a week of CEO announcements, with news from Apple, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and now Google.

We’re all familiar with traditional bar codes: the labels of systematic black lines on the back of our favorite products. But there’s a new identifying code in town: the QR code. The QR code bridges the real and cyber world, by allowing smart phone users to use apps to snap a picture of the code. The QR code image translates into a website on a users phone, creating a whole new way for web-surfers to interact with the “real” world.

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