  The Bonami-Beckner hypercontractive inequality is a powerful tool in Fourier
analysis of real-valued functions on the Boolean cube. In this paper we present
a version of this inequality for matrix-valued functions on the Boolean cube.
Its proof is based on a powerful inequality by Ball, Carlen, and Lieb. We also
present a number of applications. First, we analyze maps that encode $n$
classical bits into $m$ qubits, in such a way that each set of $k$ bits can be
recovered with some probability by an appropriate measurement on the quantum
encoding; we show that if $m<0.7 n$, then the success probability is
exponentially small in $k$. This result may be viewed as a direct product
version of Nayak's quantum random access code bound. It in turn implies strong
direct product theorems for the one-way quantum communication complexity of
Disjointness and other problems. Second, we prove that error-correcting codes
that are locally decodable with 2 queries require length exponential in the
length of the encoded string. This gives what is arguably the first
``non-quantum'' proof of a result originally derived by Kerenidis and de Wolf
using quantum information theory, and answers a question by Trevisan.
