an illustration:
typing http://www.bomega.com on my standard camphone would cost me at least 36 keystrokes. At this point in time I’ve been busy for a little over a minute and I’m still only at your frontpage. I would probably have to surf deeper to get to the nitty gritty interesting stuff. With ShotCode this problem can be taken away.
Lets say I would say more dumb things then I usually do and, in some wild twist of fate, this becomes newsworthy. If you would want to guide people directly to me making an arse of myself all you’d have to do is point your ShotCode to the correct URL. This ShotCode could be on your businesscards, t-shirt, bumper-sticker… or hey… why not tattooed on your neck ;)

Another huge advantage is that offline information becomes accessible on impulse, you like it, you click it, you read (interact with) it. When ShotCode becomes standard I’m sure I would buy many more concert tickets because I could do so when I see the ad for the concert. Nowadays I hardly ever go to concerts because I always forget to buy the tickets.

I hope this makes at least some sense for your mother-in-law, mine got it the first time she saw it ;)

The Japanese use it all the time
There is an immense ammount of projects using them
The preffered scan interface is magazines

I need to be able to explain in one sentence why a ShotCode is cool for everybody and at this moment with the information I have I still can’t explain it.

PS: The italian text means something like this: “details of city ADV, Tokyo is from learning! and here under… ADV and piece of furniture, but were necessary the shotcode?”

Regarding your killer-app q:
We’re running an immense amount of different projects as you can do so much with ShotCodes, and the killer-app question is a recurring theme amongst many of these projects. But I’d like to think, why wouldn’t one-click-access to any form of online content be the killer app?

In Japan 68,8% of the population uses mobile barcode scanning on a daily basis, and what do they use it for? Everything you can imagine and more. ;)
I loved this idea for example (no idea what they say about ShotCode though) http://www.lospremiagrumi.com/2006/10/14/tokyo/

According to some research done amongst Japanese mobile scanners, the preffered scan interface was magazines. I’m convinced that that trend will continue in the rest of the world, which is why we’re so interested in the publishing industry.

But now that you are heree maybe you can tell us what the killer app of Shotcode is going to be?