EZcode

EZcode is a 2-dimensional bar code created by ETH Zurich and licensed to Scanbuy (which calls its service "ScanLife"). It was being promoted as a means of making products interactive for marketing purposes, but its promoter appears to have switched to the more common QR codes since. At one point, the specs were online in the Scanbuy site, but they appear to have succumbed to linkrot (but can still be found in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine).

EZcode was designed to be more compact, and more easily readable by low-resolution cameras, than other bar codes. It achieves compactness by having most of its content stored remotely on the Scanbuy server, with the bar code just having a database key to it. This makes the system depend on the remote server, giving it a single point of failure unlike bar codes which can store complete data or arbitrary URLs.

Specs

 * EZcode Specification (archived copy)

Software

 * ScanLife app downloads

Developer libraries

 * EZcode encoder SDK
 * EZcode decoder SDK

Links

 * Wikipedia article
 * ScanLife site
 * Scanbuy makes EZcode open
 * Barcoding blog entry
 * Benefits of EZcode
 * Turn Camera into EZcode Barcode reader