For some of us normal folks, a bike is a bike...is a bike. Nothing different about it and we treat it the same way we would treat a toaster. An appliance. However, if you checked out the culture of Germans, you will see that the Germans are big on their bikes. The bike is an integral part of their lifestyle and they have come up with a way to register and track bikes.

Many German bike makes are pretty expensive stuff so, who can blame them for wanting to protect the bikes from being stolen?

MyBikeNumber.com is a website that offers bike registration services completely free of charge no matter where you are. Yes, that is right, you can be anywhere in the world and you can get a bike number for free and then a QR Code is then assigned to you. In fact, this new website lets you register your bike parts as well. They are using a code inventory under a single license to do this, although we are unsure how this is going to tie-up with the rest of the world.

Once the bike is registered, you can print out the QR Code assigned to you and place it onto your bike. If the bike is stolen, you can report the bike as stolen in the website so that other bike owners are wary too and people can track the QR Code too when purchasing new or used bikes.

The only concern that we have about this concept, although ingenious, is that you have to print the QR Code yourself and for most of us, it would be using a sticker. A sticker or decal, is more often than not, removable. It would take a really foolish bike thief to not notice the QR Coded sticker.

Anyway, with that said, we are sure that this is not the end all and be it. Improvements to the system should make this quite a useful tool for bike owners. If you one of those who have never heard of QR Codes, it is a barcode system that links you to online content. You scan the QR Code with a pre-loaded QR Code reader and with that, you can read anything.

The QR Code technology has been in use for countless years in Japan and it was only in recent years that the fad seeped out of technologically-advanced Japan. In some Asian and European countries, QR Code is seen as the next level of mobile advertising. Some say that QR Code can change the way we access internet content in inconceivable waves.

Well, if you are a fan of bikes, why not head over to the website and register your bike for free and check out the system that they have in place?