It's identical to the barcodes being used by retail stores, with the major distinction being the amount of data which they could possess. The information encoded can be made up of any kind of data (e. This system of supply and demand is the basis of Points2Shop, but that does not guarentee that it will be around forever. Many "Data Collection" Offers are just spam generators (though there are work arounds, secondary e-mails, k7.