The Birth of the "Quick Response"
It’s hard to walk five meters in Colombo or Kandy without seeing those little black-and-white pixelated squares. From paying for your kottu to scanning a LinkedIn profile, QR codes have become the unofficial "digital glue" of Sri Lanka. But while we’re all experts at pointing our cameras at them, few realize that this technology wasn’t born in a Silicon Valley lab, it was born on a factory floor, inspired by an ancient board game. In the early 1990s, the automotive industry was hitting a wall. Masahiro Hara , an engineer at Denso Wave (a subsidiary of Toyota), noticed that the traditional barcodes used to track car parts were failing. Barcodes are "one-dimensional", they only store data horizontally. This meant they could only hold about 20 characters of information. Workers often had to scan up to ten different barcodes on a single box just to log the parts. The "Go" Inspiration Hara wanted a code that could be read faster and hold more dat...
