Dive Brief
- Beaverton, Ore.-based Digimarc, a digital watermarking and identification firm, says it has developed a new barcode that is invisible to the human eye, but can be read by trademark scanners.
- Digimarc has teamed with Datalogic, a maker of barcode readers, to develop the necessary retail point-of-sale systems.
- Digimarc claims the new barcodes could cut scanning time by some 50%.
- The new technology and the partnership were announced at the National Retail Federation’s Annual Convention & Expo in New York City.
Dive Insight
Because Digimarc's new invisible-to-the-eye barcodes could be printed all over product packaging, their new system would eliminate the need to search around to locate a barcode's price information, saving oodles of time at checkout. If successful, the new technology could be the most welcome price-scanning advancement since the original development of the UPC barcode system decades ago. While Digimarc claims much speedier scanning times, there's no word yet on whether we can finally stop peeling off those maddening stickers from fruit and vegetables.
