If Google kills QR for places, is QR dead?

Nope.

QR and NFC do different things.  You can't print an NFC chip on a billboard, your roof, your car, in a magazine or other places that are 'far enough' away from the reader.  NFC, though awesome, reminds me so much of Bluetooth.  It's a hardware solution, requiring expensive readers (your phone or the store's base unit) and expensive data units (the chip, though inexpensive, can't be produced like any other print material).

Some background--  People are saying that QR may be dead in the water now that Google has pulled support for QR codes on their Places product.  Let's think about it for a minute. Google is in the search business.  They probably hated the fact that to enhance their usability of the search product in a geographic and small business environment they needed to physically print and ship unique stickers for the windows of small businesses...  That's probably the who reason they stopped.  I doubt there was a memo at the Googleplex saying "Nobody do anything with QR anymore--- we don't like it."

So let's look at the options:  For QR to work, you need a camera (which pretty much every phone made today comes with) and you need software (which is available for free in a myriad of different incarnations, platforms, languages and styles).  A lot of phones come with the software already!  You can make QR codes yourself for free.  You can print them on anything for zero incremental printing cost.  People are

 starting to use them for things that are useful like putting links in magazines or watching videos from billboards.  Privacy is controlled by the user.  By that I mean, I can scan a code, go to a website see some content and then

With NFC, the solution is hardware driven, you have to trust the phone, the retailer, the bank or the Telco to make sure that they're not sharing the wrong thing at the wrong time.  The biggest push is for mobile payments, so now we're diving directly into my wallet with any mistakes, errors, hacks or leaks. Proximity is a

-- meaning it only works from a touch to a few centimeters away. What about something I see online, on a billboard, on the back of a streetcar?  I can't make the chips myself, so as a brand marketer-- to present any NFC-based solution-- we are talking $eriou$ dough.  There is no test and learn with this stuff, because they have to build it into the phones or the SIMs before anyone can actually use it.

I think that's enough of a rant.  NFC does not replace QR.  QR is just annoying for Google.