Wednesday night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the band Odd Future performed. However rather than Fallon holding up an album cover to introduce the group, as has been the norm almost since talk shows have featured musicians, he held up an LP-sized QR code. That code, when scanned by a smartphone with the appropriate app, took the viewer to OddFuture.com, which of course “captures” the viewer a little more than simply showing an album cover.

The QR code is a relatively simple idea that, despite having been around for several years now, is still flying under the radar to some degree. Easily created on any number of sites, the QR code is a matrix barcode containing a simple set of data. When a smartphone, equipped with one of the plethora of free barcode reader apps available, scans the code, it captures that data set which in turn forces a process. That can mean anything from the smartphone’s browser being sent to a particular site, such as Late Night viewers being navigated to OddFuture.com, to the phone saving information—say, a “v card” (digital business card).

While Jimmy Fallon certainly isn’t the first person to use the QR code, his display is one of the more mainstream of late. It also begs the question of how widely we could see the idea used in the future. The possibilities are essentially endless in most industries. In real estate alone, one could imagine issuing a QR code for each house on the market. If an interested party saw a listed house in passing, they could simply scan the code off the sign, which would then display listing information for the property as well as contact information for the relevant Summa agent. For that matter, QR codes on the back of every business card could send a smartphone’s browser to a web site displaying every listing in a given area. While that may not be of much use to Jimmy Fallon, it could be a big part of how we do business in the future.