Featured in many sci-fi stories as a quicker, more efficient way to record and transfer information, barcodes are both extremely commonplace today, and still amazingly poorly understood by many.

The patch of irregular vertical lines that revolutionised checking out at the supermarket and facilitated the globalisation of retail is turning 50. But as the barcode celebrates its birthday on ...

Who would have thought that the lowly barcode, the stodgy grandfather of the identification technology world, would reemerge as a marketer’s dream? Well, it is happening. A new generation of barcodes ...

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Hailed as 'space-age' technology upon their launch in Britain in 1979, 'bar-coding' was praised as a wonderful invention that would speed up the weekly shop. But 50 years after being first used on ...

Beep. You hear it every time you buy a product in a retail store. The checkout person slides your purchase over a scanner embedded in their checkout stand, or shoots it with a handheld scanner. The ...

Most of us would have done shopping in malls, shops and like-wise places and at the time of payment at cash counter you must have seen that the salesman had scanned the tag of the product you ...

Here’s one more app you can delete from your iPhone: that QR code and barcode scanner you only occasionally use. With an update rolling out today, Google’s Chrome mobile browser can do the job instead ...

Supermarket chains including Tesco, Morrisons and Ocado are already trialling QR codes on products which will eventually replace barcodes in an eco-friendly drive. The retailers have brought in QR ...

(The Conversation) — Few objects in the world are more immediately recognizable than the barcode. After all, barcodes are all around us — more than 6 billion are scanned every single day. They’re on ...