*Great video by scan.me explaining what a QR Code is
Founded in 2011 by Garrett Gee, a Brigham Young University student, Scan is a company that creates technologies such as NFC image recognition and QR codes in order to bring businesses and individuals from the real world together into the digital sphere.
It has not yet been a year since Scan’s app was released, and it has already received over 10 million downloads from the Android Marketplace and the Apple App Store. There are users of the application in over 77 countries around the world.
According to Gee, the entire idea for Scan came to him when he discovered a need within the mobile industry.
He explained this need by using Foursquare as an example. He said what Foursquare had dome was create a check-in space so that geo-tagging could be utilized with a strong name brand to support it so that consumers would accept it.
Equally, “that was something the QR codes space was lacking,” he said, adding that when he first saw the barcodes, he was very impressed by their technology and the way that it was contained “in a really ugly, crowded space. Someone should make a pretty product for this.’”
With his app and web design skills, Gee and his friends from BYU, Ben Turley and Kirk Ouimet, co-founded Scan and created the app’s first version within about a month. It became almost instantly successful. Following some investment seeking, the founders obtained $1.7 million, by explaining to investors that they were the iPhone generation and knew what they were doing in the industry.
