How can a T-shirt link to a website? Simple: you put a logo on the shirt that a cellphone camera can recognize. Then, when someone snaps a picture of the logo, the phone automatically calls up the site that person has chosen to advertise. It could be your MySpace page, Facebook profile, blog — whatever. Cool, right? Well, sort of. The company behind this idea, W-41, has a lot of hurdles to overcome if they're going to pull this off, the first being simple awareness. People would have to care enough to get the software on their phones, and there'd have to be enough people with logos on their shirts to make it worthwhile. But as a concept, this is a decent idea for integrating the online world with the real one. It would get more traction if one of the big social-networking sites partnered with W-41 for a public push, possibly with things like treasure hunts that strategically put logos in public places. That might get a lot of people involved quickly, as long as they take down the prices of the shirts, too. Fifty bucks for a T-shirt is crazy no matter what it does.
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