Did you know that Germany have their own and specific barcode for their pharmaceutical industry? Yes, that’s right and it is called Pharmazentralnummer or Pharma-Zentral-Nummer which is abbreviated as PZN and means Pharmaceutical Central/General Number. It is mainly used as an identification tool for medicine and health-care products in Germany and some of the other German-speaking countries. Pharmazentralnummer standard is basically a “cut” version of Code39 – it uses the same encoding algorithm but can carry only digits – 0123456789. Typically on every  barcode, like on the one below, created with our multi-standard barcode generator, there is a “PZN” prefix which is not part of the information that is carried. Then follows a minus sign and 6 or 7 digits in a row which respectively stand for the name of the drug/medicine, its dosage form, its strength and its pack size. There is also a check-digit which is calculated in Modulo 11. If you wonder what does the last one – well it is just pure Math. Just take the numbers of the Pharma-Zentral-Nummer and multiply the first by 2, the second by 3, the third by 4 and so on till the sixth by 7. Then add up all the results, divide the sum  by 11 and take the remainder (that’s where Modulo 11 comes from). What’s tricky here is that if the check digit happens to be 10 then the PZN  barcode is treated as invalid and is not released.   Something more interesting about the PZN topology is that there are two variants – the original PZN – PZN7 and the new one –  PZN8. The main difference is the encoding capability – while a PZN7 code consists of either 6 or 7 digits the PZN8 consists of 7 or 8 digits which gives wider ranger or pharma-identification numbers that can be generated. From 01.01.2013 (only 3 months ago) Informationsstelle für Arzneispezialitäten which stands for Observatory for Proprietary Medicinal Products stopped issuing PZN7 barcodes and switched to PZN8. However in order the transfer to be smoother PZN7 has been unified with PZN8 by adding a 0 in the beginning. It won’t be before 01.01.2020 before PZN7 to be officially abandoned from the German pharmaceutical industry. Pharma-Zentral-Nummer (PZN) barcode is not very famous worldwide as it is used only in Germany. The global pharmaceutical barcode standard is the PharmaCode. However if you intend to do anything connected with the German Pharmacy or are in the barcode business and have clients from Germany then PZN is a standard that is definitely worth...

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QR Redirection – the next but in no way the last big alleviation that Quick Responsive Codes now offer to their mass adopters. That’s right – you are now able to change the target page of your QR code (if it leads to such) without any physical contacts with the code itself – you just change the website address that stands behind it. Most of you are probably familiar with the way URL shortening online tools like goo.gl, bit.ly and ow.ly work – give them a 50-characters long URL and they will return you a 10-character one. Surely it won’t be very readable after all the compression but who cares since it won’t be actually visible for the users. Moreover such short sequence of symbols perfectly matches the Golden QR rule – “The less data you encode, the less detailed or code will be and therefore more devices will be able to read it”. OK but what happens if after some time you want to use the same code but for different target page. Here is where you will face up a big problem – all the upper-mentioned shorteners don’t allow you to change anything in a link, once made smaller. Online QR redirection might not be very clear to everybody but the next example will definitely do it. Let’s imagine the following situation – you are a retailer who has just opened his new store and has announced big discounts and promotions. What you have to do in order easily to engage all the people who use smartphones or tablets is to follow these 3 steps: find a free QR code generator and encode the shortened version of the address of your webpage (which has to be mobile–friendly); do some visual customizations and alterations to your QR code, brand it and make it relevant to your business; “spread” your codes over the town, carefully choosing the positioning, making them easy to scan and attractive for the passers-by. Eventually everything goes better than expected and your QR campaign turns out to be pretty popular. So next week you decide to advertise new promotion in the same way. So you want to put the same visually-looking codes in the same locations but with different target pages. If there were 50 QRs dispersed all over the city you (or some of your employees)  would have to go and “renew” each one of them. Think about how inefficient and slow it would be to perform this cycle of QR generation and distribution on a weekly or monthly basis. Now you probably start to understand and appreciate the true power of the QR Redirection. One of the main reasons for this article were...

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Nearly 40 years ago barcodes entered not only the retail but the book and publishing industry as well. From then till now the ISBN – International Standard Book Number – is used to designate books – both printed and e-versions – all over the world which greatly alleviates not only the process of selling them like products but also tracking them in library records or identifying them (the e-books) whether they are genuine. But ISBN is not actually the first book barcode – it is more like a globally modified descendant of the SBN – Standard Book Number. SBN itself was based on the code developed in 1965 by Gordon Foster, Statistics professor at Dublin and was used in the UK till 1974. However it was in 1970 when ISO – International Standard Organisation took the 9-digit book barcode and by adding a 0 at the beginning turned SBN into ISBN – a 10-digit book barcode standard. The authority for controlling the registration of ISBNs was appointed to the International ISBN Agency. Enough talk – let’s check it out! Ok, but if you take a book that is not printed privately and was published after 2007 on its back you will see that above the barcode there is a label – ISBN-10: <a code with 10 digits> but the numbers in the barcode itself are more than 10 – they are 13. This is because since 1st January 2007 ISBN started supporting 13 – digit format where the first 3 digits are an EAN prefix – 978,979 – for a fictitious country called Bookland. Thanks to Bookland the range of identification numbers expands greatly and at the same time no book is explicitly connected with a particular country. It should be noted that ISBN codes are not mandatory by law but are more than advisory as most of the bookstores nowadays handle only books that are marked with ISBN barcodes. It is like the EAN-13 and UPC barcodes in the retail – if you don’t use them you simply can’t sell your product (or at least it would be very difficult). After being registered at the International ISBN Agency every publisher receives a block of ISBN codes which he/she can assign on his own. Below you can see an example of a partitioned ISBN barcode, generated with our multifunctional barcode generator, which is explained in details: the first 3 digits are the EAN prefix and are either 978 or 979 – the Unique Country Code for “Bookland”; the next 2 digits designate the language group to which the book belongs; the most popular are: 0 or 1 – English; 2 – French; 3 – German; 4 – Japan; 5 – Russian; after that is...

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EAN-13 is a one-dimensional barcode standard which is widely used all over the world as product identifier at the point of sell. EAN stands for European/International Article Number but it can be also found as GTIN which means Global Trade Item Number. When introduced in the USA in 1973, the UPC standard wasn’t meant to be used globally. That is why the countries from the European union in 1977 used the UPC encoding algorithm and introduced the EAN topology. The concept is absolutely the same, the only difference is in the numbering system. Instead of 12, EAN codes use 13 digits and instead of 1, they use 2 or 3 digits to denote the country where the item was produced. For example from 00 to 13 represent the USA and Canada, from 40 to 44 –  Germany and so on. Often EAN-13 is classified as a superset of UPC, because every Universal Product Code is basically an EAN code with an additional 0 in the beginning. Unfortunately machines that read EAN codes were able to read UPC codes but not vice versa. That is why a global initiative was started in 2005 that made North America, Australia and New Zealand accept the EAN -13 standard alongside with the UPC, in order foreign producers to be able to sell their goods in these regions. The world slowly adopted the EAN as an international barcode standard and uses it for product identification at the point of sell and. That is why it is also called GTIN. The EAN barcode on the right, created with our EAN barcode generator – EANEncoder, shows that its structure is just like one of the UPC: 2 to 3 digits for country code/prefix; 5 digits for manufacturer’s key; 5 digits the item key; 1 check digit; However the global nature of EAN barcodes leads to a strict hierarchy when it comes down to key and article assignment. The International Article Numbering Association, placed in Belgium, gives every registered country an unique prefix (the first two digits). Once a country gets its code, its starts maintaining its own EAN code database and has the authority to give the manufacturers located in it their keys (the next five digits). Once a producer is registered and is in possession of its key the pattern repeats – every manufacturer has its own barcode database and the authority to assign its product any item key from 00000 to 99999. The last digit of an EAN barcode is the check digit, which just like in the UPC, tells the scanner whether what it has just read is accurate. Here is the other “visual” distinction between an UPC and EAN code – the...

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QR codes are widely adopted for advertising purposes, especially in Europe, China and their motherland – Japan. But in 2011 Jim Hamilton described something quite surprising on his blog about Tokyo during his visit there – Quick Responsive codes have slowly began to disappear from the surroundings of the Japanese capital. Some claim that the 2D matrix barcodes are no longer as dominant as they used to be and will soon completely vanish from the marketing stage. Although QR codes have taken the world and the advertising business by storm, nowadays, with the great advancements in the mobile and internet technologies, a new tendency is gaining speed – fast short keyword searching. Surely, with the new unprecedentedly fast mobile 4G connections and new smartphone models, most of which allow voice search, it might turn out that looking up something over the internet is faster than scanning a QR code for getting the same information. So what will it be – QR codes or Hashtags – we are only about to see (Tweeterers will know). Part of the advertisers might bet on the fact that a few short and relevant keyword, placed on their poster or billboard will look more appealing and attractive to the user than an edgy, black-and-white QR code. However thanks to the error-correction algorithm there are numerous QR customization techniques that allow the producers to “beautify” their code, brand it and still make it relevant to the content the user will get after a scan. Moreover the short keyword search strategy is quite restrictive for the advertisers as all they can tell the user is with what keywords to browse the web through Google, Bing or other search engine. Whereas QR codes can encode not only URLs and search queries but contact details, sms/dialing-up commands, Foursquare venue checking-in and even small-sized pictures.   Even though short-keyword searching might seem easy for the customer, for the advertisers it will be a real race to the top. Ranking high for particular keywords, if they are not specifically connected with a brand name or model, is a really hard and dreadful task. There are two options – either pay for a service like Google AdWords and get higher in the results for particular short keywords or don’t pay anything and target the so called long-tail keywords which are said to be more relevant and easy to rank for. However targeting them would be controversial to the main concept of the short keyword advertisement. Now you are probably starting to appreciate the true advantage of the QR codes over the short keyword searches – you don’t have to rank for anything or race anybody – just encode you information properly ...

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UPC barcodes are 1D barcodes which using different in size black and white vertical bars are able to encrypt a sequence of 12 numbers that serve as a key. UPC stands for Unified Product Code and is widely adopted in the manufacturing and retail industries of countries from North America. The main purposes for which the UPC barcode standard is used are product labeling, tracking of packages and checking-out a product at the point of sell. The UPC barcode model was firstly introduced in the grocery sector of the USA in 1973 in order to increase the speed of receiving and selling goods at the markets. Thus the inventory records in stores and warehouses became more automated and easier to maintain. The Unified Product Code proved to be really efficient and as a result it broke the frame of the grocery industry and entered, as we can now notice, almost every sphere of our life. It was the UPC barcode that basically gave birth of the EAN standard – the UPC equivalent for the rest of the world. Enough talk – let’s check it out! Nowadays UPC barcodes are highly used in the commerce at the so called point of sell when an item is being checked out from a store. What you can see on the right is an UPC barcode made with our UPC barcode generator – UPCEncoder. It is composed of two main parts: numbers – the human-readable part – and vertical bars – the encoded version of the numbers which is machine-readable. The number of digits of a standard UPC barcode is 12 – the first six stand for the identification number of the manufacturer – in our case – 639382. The following five numeric characters – 00039 – are the item number. Therefore every item of a particular brand – be it a box of cookies or a whole package of cookies – can be uniquely identified after scanning the UPC barcode labeled on it. However in order to have your own UPC barcodes as a manufacturer which are recognized and acknowledged in the retail industry, you have to be a member of the GS1 organization and to be in possession of a company prefix (the first six digits of a UPC code). Finally the last 12th digit is the check digit. It basically tells the scanner what it should have read and if it coincides with the data received from the code then the scan is successful. So far this was the basic body of an UPC barcode. But in fields like the Publishing industry there are the so called add-ons. Bear in mind that add-ons can only be read alongside with an...

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