A tweaking of quick response codes let consumers authenticate products with a smartphone scan.
A company called Expander has just managed to develop a technology based on QR codes in order to mark various products with unique fingerprint-like barcodes that will give consumers the ability to verify their authenticity in a way that would be nearly impossible for scammers to be able to replicate.
This led to a pitch by Ollie Langridge that was exceptionally impressive to investors who were keen to take part.
The idea is to provide barcodes like QR codes that are unique and that are simple for smartphone owners to be able to scan. Through that quick reading of the barcode, the mobile device user should then be able to help to ensure that the products that they are interested in purchasing is what they believe it to be. The importance of this ability was illustrated by showing how these quick response codes could have been implemented in order to prevent the melamine food safety disaster in China in which infant milk powder was contaminated and resulted in many deaths.
Those claims made by Langridge about the QR codes were powerful enough to immediately interest investors.
Early stage angel investors were already prepared to open their wallets as of the demo day. They included members of Angel HQ, an angel group from Wellington that includes Susan Iorns. It also included the NZ Venture Investment Fund. Together, they put forward $500,000 for the development of the Green Codes by Expander, using cloud based QRcode technology.
Iorns was taken with Expander to such a degree that she has now become its chair. She explained that “I look for a couple of things when I’m considering investing in a company – whether the company is likely to create high-skilled jobs in New Zealand and whether it is likely to succeed abroad.” She also added that “Expander’s technology was both scalable and I didn’t see any geographic boundaries. Ollie’s pitch was also a great and worthy call to action.”
For a technology that has been called obsolete or even dead on many different occasions, QR codes have been appearing in a growing number of different types of cutting edge applications.
