[IEG]Assignment 4 Topic 3

Barcode was invented in the 50s and was put into use in 70s. This tiny black and white box soon becomes one of the most important reasons of the economy bloom in 20 century. You could’t see a single good that being sell in supermarket does not have a barcode label nowadays. Barcode enable real world data to be read by machine very easily. I am sure you can understand how barcode helps the society ─ just need to remember how much time you have wasted last time in supermarket when the barcode reader goes wrong and need to manually type in the price for each item. But the data that can be store in barcode is no more than a short string. And this is not good. Well, not “not good” but people would expect this tiny label could bring more convenient in many more ways other than just a price tag. In Japan, QR code is one of the solutions of this problem.

Like barcode, QR code is also an “optical machine-readable representation of data”. But it could store more much data then barcode and the 2 dimensional images allows the data stored inside to be read from any angle.

(from wiki)

You now could see QR code everywhere in Japan. Shops, websites, business card, as long as there are needs. The wide-spread of QR code is mainly due to the birth of smart phone. The new “computer/phone”allows user use their hand held mobile device to scan the item and obtain information. Item price, where can they find it, where it was made, basically just every information you may want to know.




↑ QR code for IE World URL


You could just use a camera phone to take this picture down, run a simple decoder and the next moment you will be showing the frontpage of IE World. No more typo, no more long url to be remember, no more trouble in telling the url, the convenient it brings sure is one of the reason for its success in Japan. The success of QR code is also a product of many new things that is only be around 3 to 4 years like the rising popularity of camera phones and better network connection (wifi, 3G etc). The need of improvement is always there, a real innovation that being put in the correct time and correct place have no reason for not success.