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The first question may be, is there a future for barcoding? History is only a good prediction of the future in a few situations, but in this case, it applies. So, the question then is, why has [...]

Meet Masahiro Hara, born in Tokyo in 1957. Mr. Hara studied electronic engineering at Hosei  University and graduated in 1980, finding work at the Toyota Group. Having seen the benefits of [...]

Almost from the beginning, the demise of barcodes has been predicted. Barcodes are still relevant on their recently-celebrated 50th anniversary. The longevity of the barcode is based on two [...]

Wednesday, June 26 was the 50th anniversary of the first commercial scan of a barcode on a consumer product, a pack of Wrigley chewing gum. Those of us who were involved had no idea when and [...]

Our recent article about the longevity of barcodes triggered a range of responses. One comment referred to barcodes as the “weakest link” in the supply chain. There are many links in the supply [...]

Like most innovations, barcode technology started with a problem looking for a solution. Unlike a lot of solutions, barcode technology wasn’t possible without the existence of a solution that had [...]

Dr. Jerome Swartz, former CEO of Symbol Technologies is credited with having defined barcodes as “…portable, disposable memory.” Someday I hope to confirm or refute that in a conversation with [...]

All barcodes do the same thing… All barcodes do the same thing: they store data. Whether they are 1D symbols like UPC and Code 128 or 2D symbols like QR Code and Datamatrix, they are all [...]

For most of its history, barcode quality has been a matter of print quality: can the scanner read the barcode? Originally barcode verification was based on measuring bar and space widths. This [...]