The look on someone's face, usually none-techies, when they see this for the first time is priceless. What I'm talking about is a hyperlink from a printed document - yes printed, not on a web page.
This article makes a bit of an assumption that you are already familiar with physical linking, which in a nutshell is done with 2D barcodes or a text-based hardlinking application such as buildhardlink.com. A hardlink is a way of making an information connection between some physical object and your cell phone - sort of like a hyperlink for the real world.
So, here is the example of what the title describes. Let's say that you have distributed a printed text document in a meeting. Within that document are terms, part numbers or maybe company employees and executives names that are hardlinked. Hardlinked means that they are physical hyperlinks associated with a database file, which is accessible from your cell phone. What this condition sets up is a way for the recipients of these documents to access information about the links long after they have left your meeting. For example, if you wanted Sr. VP Bob Smith to be a link in that document you would do two things: add the data to the database and place two forward slashes in front of his name (//BobSmith). A user can now, and at anytime in the future, enter BobSmith into their cell phone or Black Berry and see whatever information Bob wants to share such as his professional position or maybe his contact information.
Think about what this does, you now have the ability to reuse these links on all future documents, you also have the ability to update them as the need arises without having to reprint original document and it reduces the need to add explanation in a document that may seem obvious to some but not others. This is powerful stuff, but this article was not meant to be a business article. The application being described here was originally developed by a company called OracleJane, under the trade name QuickData for commercial use. What is great news, if you like this kind of thing, is that they have recently deployed a free public use version of this capability available at buildhardlink.com.
So, to recap, what we have is a text document with select words or numbers identified with two forward slashes as hardlinks. Those link identifiers can be entered into a users blackberry (or any cell phone) by pointing their browser to the database gateway at hardlink.mobi.
Enjoy.