P8tch – your wearable URL

The P8tch is the ultimate in geek utility-wear. Not only does it look completely safe and all psuedo-military like but it’s useful too because it also happens to be a mobile phone scannable URL that’ll take the reader to any web page you desire.

So, for example, it could be the RSS feed for your blog, your Flickr page, your favouite website, anything at all and you can configure it from one address to another whenever you like.

The patch velcros onto your clothes, bag, head, underside of your dog or wherever you want to put it. The top part of the design is aesthetic only but the bottom jumble of nonsense is a QRCode that can be read on the iPhone with 2DSense or on other smartphones through Sempedia. Your phone browser will then take you to wherever the decoded URL directs.

You can pick up a P8tch for $19.95, plus whatever it costs to get them to lob it over to the UK, and if you’re not sold on the idea, there’s a couple of nice examples of imaginative use on the product site, including…

THEM: “Hey, what happened to your leg?”
YOU: “Oh, I broke it in a highly harebrained, yet thoroughly entertaining way. Here, scan my p8tch and you can watch the video!”
THEM: [scans the p8tch: BEEP!] “OH DEAR GOD YOU IDIOT wow ha ha, let me buy you a beer.”
YOU: [enjoys beer]

THEM: “Y-e-e-ah, thanks for helping me punch down all 3,000 of those CAT6 cables over the weekend! Is there anything I can–“
YOU: “YES THERE IS you can buy me the top thing on my Amazon Wishlist RIGHT HERE AND NOW just scan my p8tch and complete the transaction while I am standing here between you and the door to the NOC.”

Personally, I like the idea of using them for invitations to secret parties; encode the QR for a Google.maps location and send them out to your mates.

Even if they didn’t have such a wonderfully geeky use, I still think they look pretty good. There’s something very US airborne cavalry about them except with white instead of yellow. It’d be almost like we were blogging in ‘Nam.

P8tch (via Core77)

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