QR code — definition

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What is a QR code?

  QR stands for Quick Response. What is a QR code? A two-dimen­sion­al ver­sion of the bar­code, com­posed of black and white pix­els.

Made in Japan

The QR Code was born in Japan in 1994. 

Its inven­tor, Masahi­ro Hara, was a chief engi­neer at Den­so Wave, an auto­mo­tive parts manufacturer. 

His goal? Find a sys­tem to bet­ter track the path of spare parts and speed up the logis­ti­cal process­es of pro­duc­tion in Toy­ota’s plants. 

Inspired by the design of the game of go, Masahi­ro invent­ed the QR Code, a two-dimen­sion­al bar­code made of black squares on a white background. 

  Go game and QR Code

Unlike a UPC — Uni­ver­sal Prod­uct Code - bar­code, the QR Code allows for faster read­abil­i­ty and can store approx­i­mate­ly 100 times more data. Since the advent of smart­phones, QR codes have become an inte­gral part of mobile mar­ket­ing.

The advantages of QR codes?

  • Con­tains more infor­ma­tion than a barcode

A bar­code can only con­tain one string of infor­ma­tion in the form of a numer­ic code. This makes it use­ful in envi­ron­ments such as retail. It allows to quick­ly and pre­cise­ly iden­ti­fy a prod­uct to which a unique num­ber is attached. How­ev­er, it does­n’t offer much more.

On the oth­er hand, a QR code can con­tain much more infor­ma­tion. These can be in dif­fer­ent forms, such as words and char­ac­ters. It offers these capa­bil­i­ties while occu­py­ing the same space as a bar­code, and is just as easy to gen­er­ate or print.

  • Reduced num­ber of errors

A bar­code is not pro­tect­ed against dupli­ca­tion. The greater infor­ma­tion stor­age capac­i­ty of a QR code allows for the inte­gra­tion of secu­ri­ty mechanisms.

  • More acces­si­ble read­ing and printing

QR codes can be read and under­stood by smart­phones and dig­i­tal cam­eras. Bar­codes, on the oth­er hand, require spe­cial tech­nol­o­gy to be read and interpreted.

Like a bar­code, a QR code only requires black and white print­ing (although any col­or or even mul­ti­ple col­ors can be used).

  • Increased secu­ri­ty

The encryp­tion of the infor­ma­tion con­tained in the QR codes offers an addi­tion­al lev­el of protection.

Different types of QR codes?

It is pos­si­ble to cre­ate QR codes of dif­fer­ent shapes and styles and to real­ize codes for dif­fer­ent types of interactions.

 

 

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