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Westminster and Camden councils have laid out plans to use QR codes on the sides of public waste bins to promote recycling.
Currently the London councils have the biggest street litter problem in the UK, with 25,000 tonnes of litter produced every year. And the problem with this is that only around 10% of it is currently recycled.
A dairy cow has had a QR code spray painted on its back to promote the UK dairy industry.
The QR code, which is a type of souped-up barcode, can be scanned by smartphones or other specialist readers and directs users to a blog which records the cow’s daily routine.
Somerby dairy farmer Jane Barnes said she’d had the wacky idea to highlight dairy farming challenges and the reduction in the number of sons who were following their fathers into the farming trade.
Payment for goods in store just got easier thanks to online payment service PayPal. PayPal is the familiar method of payment online, which thousands of users have as adopted as standard over the last decade or so, especially users of online marketplace eBay. So to break into the standard retail shopping arena has taken a lot of thought. And the way they’ve decided to do it is by using barcodes.
A new system of cash withdrawal has been developed by ATM manufacturer NCR and the system uses barcodes at the core of its technology.
NCR are looking for a partner to help them rollout their new cash withdrawal method, which involves customers simply having their mobile phone scanned by the cash dispenser to release funds.
Renowned for their innovative products and applications, Apple showed developers at its recent Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco it is always looking to stay ahead of the game, with the introduction of its new Passbook app.
Along with the unveiling of its flagship operating system iOS6, the company took the opportunity to showcase Passbook, an app that lets users manage their store cards, movie tickets, boarding passes and other items that contain barcode labels, QE codes or any other scannable codes.
A new study from Scanbuy, the ScanLife mobile barcode developer, has shown that there has been a huge increase in traffic over the past year in the number of people using mobile phones to scan barcode labels and QR codes.
The company monitors traffic for a variety of brands in the United States and through its analysis found there had been a year-on-year increase of over 150 per cent.
Online retailer Amazon has recently brought out an app for those with Microsoft-powered handsets. This new mobile shopping gadget makes use of a barcode scanner to check retail prices in stores.
It is hoped the free barcode scanning app (available from the Windows Phone Marketplace) will increase the popularity of smartphones using the Windows mobile operating system as consumers will be able to use it to scan products and compare them with the Amazon price as well as make ‘one-click’ purchases through their device.
In the United States, ShopSavvy’s barcode scanning app has become very popular, with many retailers rushing to open up their inventory and pricing data to the platform so users can enjoy this mobile shopping tool to the full.
Now that ShopSavvy has amassed more than 10 million users, the company has decided to relax the rules on new stores joining up with the app through the introduction of the ShopSavvy Marketplace. This lets retailers input their own data to the ProductCloud system.
The pricing and selling of goods has been made much simpler since the introduction of barcode labels just a few decades ago. Most barcodes are printed onto a product at the product’s time of manufacture, but there are also barcode labels available which can be affixed to any product at any point in the product’s life-cycle.
There are a wide range of different types of barcode labels available for many different types of application. Some of these include:
Coca-Cola has just put pen to paper in a marketing agreement with ScanLife which will see them print QR codes on all Coca-Cola Classic and Coca-Cola Zero cans in Spain.
The QR codes, which work in the same way as barcodes, can be printed onto any type of packaging and can be read by any QR code reader application. The idea, of course, is to strengthen Coca-Cola brand interaction with consumers, who have embraced this new type of technology.