It's time we showed the hardest working optical machine-readable representation of data a little love - Happy 57th birthday barcode! The internet is abuzz with interesting tidbits about those black-and-white stripes after Google commemorated the occasion on their main page today. The two birthdays they considered noteworthy last week were those of Confucius and Ghandi, so at the very least, the humble barcode is in very good Google holiday logo company.
Now, some of you might wonder why I'm getting so giddy about a stack of little black lines - question my sincerity even - but barcodes are pretty important here at Collegeboxes. We've developed an awesome system (if I do say so myself) that uses barcodes to track customers' inventory, manage containerized storage, keep up-to-date with on-campus crews' locations during pick-up and delivery windows, and just in general provide the most streamlined, transparent service in the business.
When a student uses Collegeboxes, they log on to their online account management dashboard to create and print labels with barcodes, which are scanned four times - when Collegeboxes picks up their stuff, when (and where!) they are put into storage, when they are loaded for delivery, and when they are delivered - and each scan is visible to the student through their online dashboard.
So celebrate barcodes - and the extra level of security and peace-of-mind they bring to Collegeboxes - by reading about the rise of the barcode, checking out some barcode portraits (and barcoding yourself!), reminiscing about the allure of that twinkly red laser, or creating your own barcode.
