By Katherine Laidlaw, The Hustle | In 1992, on a factory floor in a Toyota auto-parts subsidiary in Japan, workers were drowning in barcodes. They were everywhere: some components on the line needed ten barcodes just to capture all the tracking data. Employees scanned them, one by one, hundreds of times a day. Masahiro Hara, an engineer on the barcodes team at Denso, the subsidiary, tackled the problem. What if, he reasoned, you could build a barcode in two dimensions instead of one? You could pack it with information, cutting the number of scans from ten to one on every item.
In the company cafeteria, Hara watched as his coworkers squared off over a game of Go, a board game played with black and white stones on a grid. The contrast he saw there inspired the design for what would eventually become the QR code, a code that can be read from any angle and hold 200x more data than the barcodes emblazoned on the products we buy today.
After a year and a half of work on the QR, Denso patented the innovation. Rather than enforce royalties on it, they published the specs so any company could use it for free.
And that decision is about to change every single thing you buy.
QR code takeover
Twenty years earlier, in 1974, a cashier at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio, scanned the world’s first barcode, affixed to a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum.
Grocery retailers and manufacturers had recently formed a committee and chosen the Universal Product Code, or UPC, as the single industry standard.
The decision created a network effect: once enough retailers required UPC codes on products, manufacturers had to comply. And once manufacturers printed UPCs on packages, retailers needed to buy scanners.
It also created a self-reinforcing monopoly, one that with widespread adoption reached critical mass by 1980.
The Uniform Code Council, now known as GS1, received the authority to issue the first six numbers of every barcode, called company prefixes. It’s the only way to sell mainstream retail products: there’s no alternative registry.
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https://thehustle.co/originals/why-barcodes-are-about-to-go-extinct
[While the QR code works for “products,” we’re still not sure how that will affect the Music Industry. COMBO offers free bar codes with a membership but QR codes can be generated on their own with the information you want to provide. ~ Barb]
Photo: QR code
