The next time you whip out your phone to take a picture of a funny billboard or sexy ad, you might accidentally be about to make a purchase. Advertisers are playing around with the idea including Semacode tags on their ads, allowing, for instance, people who like a shirt on a poster to take a picture of it with their cell phone and purchase it on the spot. Don't freak out — this doesn't mean every time you snap goofy photos of your friends you'll be racking up hidden fees and have tons of odd things waiting for you in the mail. Hopefully not, anyway.

Semacode tags work a lot like the barcodes you've already seen scanned on just about everything you want to buy. Rather than a series of black lines, Semacode takes the form of a black-and-white block formation which can carry coded information such as website addresses. That information can be decoded by capturing it with a digital camera, such as those on pretty much all cell phones these days, and then take the photographer to product pages, info sites, and the like. What's this mean for you and me? Well, impulse shopping might get a whole lot more visible. And expensive. — Kevin Hall

Ads of the World, via Cherryflava