Back in 2003, SmartMobs’ Roland Piquepaille described stenanography for our readers. My friend Greg told me about a new application of the old technology described this week in a BBC article about how ‘Japanese firm Fujitsu is pushing a technology that can encode data into a picture that is invisible to the human eye but can be decoded by a mobile phone with a camera.’ While the process is covert, Futjitsu sees it as a bridge from the printed page to the digital domain:

That data could be a phone number, a message or a website link. Printed materials can then connect to the online world by storing information which tells the phone to connect the web.

The paper-to-digital use is new, however the underlying idea is very old:

The technique stems from a 2,500-year-old practice called steganography, which saw the Greeks sending warnings of attacks on wooden tablets and then covering them in wax and tattooing messages on shaved heads that were then covered by the regrowth of hair.