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For tourists visiting San Francisco, Antenna Audio offers free listening tours. The company, based in Sausalito, is placing dozens of bar codes around the city in places like Union Square or at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid.

By scanning the bar code, a user will automatically be guided to a Web site that contains 15- to 20-second audio snippets about various points of interest around the city.

"There are people who may not bother with downloading something online, but if they walk by and see something cool, and if they can scan a bar code and get information on just one or two landmarks, they can find out what this cool site is all about," said Eric Longo, Antenna Audio's business development director.

That's the key to the bar codes. It allows a company or business to engage customers in an immediate way, giving them information that would be hard to deliver otherwise. And for customers, it's a shortcut to information that would be hard to track down quickly while out and about.