Christoph Wagner is the CEO of Scanbot SDK, a software development company specializing in data capture software for mobile and web apps. Considering how quickly retail is changing, it is astounding ...

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.

Barcodes work based on light reflected back to scanner optics: black does not reflect light, while the white (blank) spaces do reflect light. Because characters (alphabetic, numeric, special) are ...