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527 points lxm | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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infecto ◴[] No.27676119[source]
It's really interesting to see how a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way are so quick to attack and be negative.

Like all things in life, when its implemented well it works and when it does not it is terrible. I still think there is room for this to be the future though. I say this as a westerner but perhaps the west is not ready for it yet but I really enjoyed the experience of using QR codes in China. Go to a restaurant I just get shown where to sit and don't need to waste time with the host/server giving me menus or telling me anything. If I have questions they are there to answer the but I can also just sit down, scan the QR code, menu opens up and I can order food. Food just shows up minutes later. When I am done I go to the front and pay with Alipay.

The benefits to me of not having physical menus is huge. From the business perspective there is less interaction time necessary to serve a diner. Sure if this is an upscale high touch experience physical menu is where it stays BUT the majority of dining experiences are not like this. The menu is up to date and easy to modify. Possible to include multiple pictures and information about the food.

I might be wild but I really like the experience and wish more places would adopt it. Like all things I think here in the west its still too new so we have a mixed bag of good and bad implementations. Give it a few years and I think it will be narrowed down to the POS providers who offer it as a feature.

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1. samstave ◴[] No.27677323[source]
A little while ago, I was making labels for cannabis products. All cannabis products need to be tested by a lab to show their constituent properties (pesticides, THC, CDB, etc)

One of the things I did was create a QR code on the labels such that they pointed to a bitly address which then redirected to the PDF of the lab results for each product.

This allowed for the consumer to actually read the Lab results, and it provided an litmus to the interest in each product by count of scans.

I loved it, it worked really well - but the company wasnt too fond of showing the direct lab results for the reason that the PDFs had the manufacturing facilities address on the PDF...

Could have done it better, but the overall idea was sound and was very easy to implement. An admin assistant could build this out.

Thought of also tying it to slack or something such that we could just have a product interest channel and get an alert any time the products were scanned into that channel...

There were actually a number of creative things that could be done using QR codes.

This is great for very small packaged goods, such as pre-rolls, wax, diamonds, etc - where you have very little space on the package, and are already regulated on exactly what information you must include on the packaging, so if you wanted to provide more detailed product info, this would work well..

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2. infecto ◴[] No.27677396[source]
I love this. It reminds me of transparency from amazon. Products have a QR code on the outside of the packaging to have some minimal effort prevention on counterfeits. Includes some metadata like manufacturing date and location.

https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency

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3. samstave ◴[] No.27677956[source]
Huh, yeah the basic intent is the same as with Transparency (hadn't heard about that service until today) -- but its super simple to build out, and any company can easily do it...

There is a bad-ass product from Seagull Scientific, called "barTender" (as in Barcode Tender) -- which is free to use, and does any and all barcodes/QR codes - and label document design.

The only cost is a $500/$600 license for actually connecting it to a printer - but it makes it a breeze to create awesome labels, and print them out en-mass (like many thousands on the high speed printers)...

You can hook it up to a DB or a spreadsheet for pulling all your product labeling info easily to fields so they auto fill for the products you are printing.

Also, with using bitly - you also get a map of the geoip location of each scan - so you can see where interest is high geographically...