Created in 1994, quick response codes were first used to track vehicles during the manufacturing process at Toyota. More than a decade later, these powerful codes are used almost anywhere and in any industry where you need to store data. In fact these codes are no longer confined to just industrial use as many individuals use them to store even personal data.
Why is QR code superior to barcodes?
Barcodes are single dimensional codes that contain information. They became hugely popular for their ability to store information about a product that could be read at high speed through barcode readers and scanners. However, the limitation of barcodes lay in the quantity of content they could contain.
As the world advanced, the need to store additional information than what could be contained in barcodes became imperative. With single dimensional codes, there was only so much or rather so little that you could store.
Maximizing barcode digits to store more data resulted in inconveniences such as readability issues, increased printing cost and additional space requirement. Two-dimensional codes spread out in the horizontal as well as vertical regions – were the immediate answer to this problem, leading to the square shaped QR codes.
Reading these codes, required barcode readers or scanners. Hence, they were only popular for industry and commercial use. However, with the emergence of mobile phones and smart phones and downloadable scanner apps in these devices, QR codes have quickly transcended industrial boundaries.
Today, almost everyone has a smart phone with a scanner app and thus are able to scan QR codes and interpret the data it contains, anywhere. For this reason, quick response codes have become hugely popular in advertising, marketing, social networking and in the event management circles.
T-shirts, advertisement billboards, print media, electronic media, product packaging, brochures, business cards, event tickets, websites etc, all contain these 2-D codes. These quirky codes can have a powerful impact on how you conduct your daily social life or promote your business and can easily be generated using free QR code generators.
Many smart phone owners are often put off by typing out the long URL address of a website in the tiny mobile browser. Therefore, one of the first things that you as a business owner need to do is generate a quick response code for your website using a free dynamic QR code generator.
Customers must get set to enjoy easy mobile shopping now with the onset of these powerful codes. These two-dimensional graphical images are set to change the way the world shops. If you have a smart phone, you will no longer need to use your computer for online shopping. qr code