In the never ending contest to be digitally hip, we have come to expect announcements out of San Francisco and sometimes Boston or Austin. This is where the innovators and early adopters reside. Yet it is foolish to overlook New York. New York might not be the hotbed of innovation that San Francisco is. Instead, it is a city that excels in promotion and commercialization of the great ideas that come out of San Francisco and beyond.

Thursday morning provided another great example of this. New York City Media launched The City at Your Fingertips. At 11:15, the large Reuters Screen in Time Square began showing a series of QR Codes.

“Quick Response” or QR Codes are nothing new. They are two dimensional barcodes introduced in Japan in 1994. They have been used to share data, send text messages and access websites. One of my favorite examples of the wise use of a QR code is taxi stands in Japan where a passenger can scan a QR code with her cellphone which will automatically send a text message to the dispatcher requesting a pickup. They provide great opportunities for people to create hyperlinks in the real world. Just put a QR Code up at your business to make it easier for customers to follow your company on Twitter or like your business on Facebook.

Unfortunately, we’ve had a little bit of a chicken and egg problem with QR codes. Not many people have downloaded QR Code Readers for their cellphones; there just aren’t enough QR codes to scan. Companies have been reluctant to start using QR codes because there just aren’t enough people with QR Code Readers on their smartphones.

New York City Media, by placing QR Codes in a prominent place in Times Square has the potential to jumpstart the adoption of QR Codes. It is the sort of thing that New York always does well, helping ideas cross the chasm from the innovators to the early majority.

Various city officials were on hand for the QR Moment in Time Square. Commissioner of The New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting Katherine Oliver, who announced the moment at the Internet Week New York, #IWNY, kick off press conference was there as was Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Carole Post. The QR Moment at Time Square illustrated how New York’s focus on film, theatre and broadcasting is leading the way into the digital world. It also provided a new way for people to find out about important information about what is happening in the city.

I scanned the QR codes with my Nokia N900 and it worked very nicely. As I looked around, I saw a couple New York City Police Officers holding up their smartphones to also scan the QR codes. Will the QR Code Moment in Time Square be what it takes to get wider adoption of QR Codes in the United States? We will have to wait and see. Whether or not it does, it clearly illustrates the leadership that New York City is seeking to establish as being the city that can take great ideas and make them successful in the broader world.