35th Anniversary of the Barcode

Yeah I’m basically reposting a gizmodo post, but if it weren’t for the barcode, I wouldn’t have such a kickass job that I get to blog about barcodes. And barcode scanners.

Better Star Trek Barcode Scanner Images

One of my buddies sent me this link last night with a better view of the bridge from the new Star Trek Movie. Pretty sure there are ten barcode scanners on the bridge, including the Honeywell VoyagerBT, Honeywell Orbit, and Symbol M2000 Cyclone.

Anyway, check out the link, it’s fun times: http://www.startrekmovie.com/panoramas/bridge.html

Space: The Final Barcode Scanner Frontier

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a buddy at Motorola/Symbol about how fantastic their warranties are. So fantastic that the scanners are in use 300 years in the future.

At first I thought it was photoshopped. Why would the Enterprise have two Motorola M2000 Cyclones on the helm? And if you look to the left, it looks like there’s another one there. And yet a couple more at the top of the image.

And what’s this? A Metrologic Voyager just hangin out? Seriously? It sort of makes the Enterprise look like they raided a museum of old stuff to get the right aesthetic. I’m hoping when they go into red alert the auto-sense modes kick in. Get some sort of crazy laser party goin on in there.

It’s pretty interesting to see products get used as set dressing, especially when it’s not their intended use. Though who knows, maybe they scan barcodes to start the ship or something.

Oh and here are a couple more shots, with some brooding and drama!

I can’t pass up sharing this

I think I watched it 12 times yesterday. More content coming soon.

POS-X are Some Fancy Lads

We’ve worked pretty closely with POS-X over the past few years. They’re our go-to hardware for creating complete solutions, mostly because all their equipment works together with minimum headache and a minimal destruction of your pocketbook. They have a lineup featuring a few barcode scanners, receipt printers, cash drawers, touch screen monitors, and all-in-one PCs, and they’re always striving to give the customer what they need.

This relationship means they give us a heads up when new products are getting prepped to be unleashed on the teeming POS masses, and they’ve pushed through a pretty solid spec bump to a lot of their products in the past month or two.

I worked in tech support when their Xm90 credit card reader was first being sold, and I gotta tell you, I had more headaches with strange build quality, permanent documentation typos, and inconsistent data transmission, than with any other credit card reader/barcode scanner/player piano I had to support. Thankfully they finally got the Xm95 out in the wild, which feels a lot sturdier, sends data accurately, and is pretty straightforward to configure.

Their Xr500 printer, which has been a solid thermal receipt workhorse for the past 3 years, has been retired and replaced with the Xr510. Mostly changes under the hood, the Xr510 is better, faster, stronger. Right here is where you should make the 6 million dollar man slo-mo jump noise. The 7.9″ per second print speed is about 30% faster than the predecessor, and they’ve managed to cram in heavier duty internals to ensure longer use.

The Xr210 impact printer is a full departure from their Xr200, and actually looks kind of foreboding, at least in our main product pic. POS-X decided that Serial and Parallel weren’t enough, and decided to hook the Xr210 up with USB and Ethernet interface options as well. Excellent, since finding Serial and Parallel ports on new PCs is more difficult than spotting the Yeti on a bottle of Koakanee. It’s there. Believe me.

As for the last update, the Xp8200 pole display takes all the good features in pole displays and ignores the pitfalls and caveats that seem to permeate the market. While the Xp800 couldn’t rotate, the Xp8200’s screen can spin a full 360 degrees. People may not need a 15″ display height, so they made it adjustable. And nobody on the market really provides easily changed command modes (emulations), and so POS-X put the comfigurability of the Xp8000 in overdrive, adding Logic Controls support now. It really is the best pole display I’ve seen on the market.

Sharing Our Knowledge for Fun and Profit

Over the past month or so, we’ve been hammering out a plan to get a few more people from the company writing about their experiences. I’d like to introduce the newest member of the club, our support manager. He’s been dropping knowledge bombs here for about 4 years, and was actually the person who hired me on to be a tech nerd in the first place.

He’ll be better equipped to explain the ins and outs of his job, but usually he’s fielding the calls that his army of tech nerds can’t handle anymore. The customers who can be heard, over the phone, in the other room. The one who we’re still talking to despite every other word coming out of their mouth being an explitive.

In the coming weeks we’ll be adding in some sales success stories. The ones that really explain why we love what we do, and may help you out if you’re looking into adding data capture or pos hardware to your business but don’t know where to start.

Not too much is going on for big interesting stuff, I may have a post in a couple days about POS-X doing a pretty solid product shakeup or their receipt printer and pos accessory lineup.

Big Pushes

Hey, so aside from one random post that took 3 weeks to publish, I’ve been pretty silent the past month or so. Near burnout. I don’t think I’m ready for big pushes for releases yet. We just unleashed a few new products on the site, complete systems for barcode label printing and inventory control. I’m pretty sure these were kind of thought up the week after I got back from Austin. So the kids kicking around the ideas had a few days to think about it and then the I was a zombie from late flights and early mornings at work the next day and went along with it. These systems come with a computer, monitor, the stuff you normally get when you buy a PC, as well as a barcode scanner, some sort of software, and other equipment that’ll get you doing advanced data capture or barcode labeling or other industry catchphrases that sound cool.

So yeah, the Barcode Printing systems are out there for people who may already have a point of sale setup, but it doesn’t print labels for them, or maybe they’re creating products and want to slap UPC’s on them for distribution. It’s also handy if you have twins and can’t tell them apart. The systems come in two flavors: Value and Preferred.

Value’s designed for people who just want to label their products. They may want some basic stuff but they’re not going to use a label bigger than 2″ wide. It’s got software that’s pretty easy to use and can make solid labels for whatever.

Preferred has a bigger printer, 4″ wide is pretty wide for label stock, and it can print in direct thermal or thermal transfer. Thermal transfer won’t fade or get discolored from heat. It also uses beefier software that provides more methods for hooking into pre-existing databases. Either way, you can label a ton of stuff with this gear.

As for Inventory Control Systems, that was all me. I spent about 3 weeks pouring over the products we sell, looking at the pros and cons of each mobile computer, every piece of software, until I could figure out a way to get a full rig set up that would do what customers want and not put them in the poor house. Three flavors there: Value, Basic, and Premium. I stayed away from Preferred or Essential or other terms that put a useful quality because these setups are all awesome for somebody. And, much like a parent, I’m not going to say I like one more than the other.

Value has all you need for light inventory control. The software is pretty laid back, and it comes with a cordless barcode scanner. The range on the scanner’s about 50 meters, so this is for a small to medium-sized single warehouse. A Costco was not the Value system’s intended target. Probably not a Target either.

Basic Inventory systems take the inventory control a step further, implementing a PalmOS based mobile computer, but using the same software as the Value System. So now you’re not tethered to RF ranges or PCs, so you’re set if you have multiple locations, or want to double check inventory while you’re at home or something.

Premium systems go a step further, using much beefier software that is designed specifically for multiple locations, vendors, and order systems. It has really advanced hooks to connect to pre-existing databases, and uses pretty rad mobile computers. The software scales a lot better than the Basic or Value software, and so you can rock huge databases without too much trouble.

In all, I would say the systems help fill a niche, and provide a solution for questions we tend to get fairly often. And at the very least, we can tell customers that we know this stuff works because we had to go through the learning process already. It’s not as ambiguous as “it should work fine” or “I guess you could do that.”

This is also the first time we’ve rolled stuff onto the front page that has its own style. I like it, it’s a departure from blue and green on white and really ties the promo together as a unique entity. Unfortunately for me, or fortunately for the company, if you know my photoshop skills, I did miniscule work for the promos and brochures for the systems. It was all the work of our new Marketeer. I don’t know what to call her title. She does a ton of design work for us, but she also does marketing bookkeeping and stuff. And Marketeer sounds cool, like she’s got a brass helmet and rocketpack or something.

So four of us worked on setting this up for the past… month and a half, with the past three weeks being taken up almost entirely by this one project. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I know these systems inside and out. And now I’m ready to take a week off and go watch cartoons in my pajamas.

The art of the SKU

Being Product Manager means I’m inundated with products that are all totally awesome and all do everything perfectly. I don’t mind that, it’s actually fun seeing people really excited about printers that also read checks. They’re either tremendous liars or insane. Regardless, it’s a great show.

Recently, I worked on getting a industrial barcode printer from Zebra up on our site. It’s the S4M, and rocks 6″ per second print speeds and looks like it can take a hit from a howitzer and keep printing. It’s also been in my “put it on the site” queue since July and I’d be remiss to put it off for a full year.

This would probably be as good a time as any to outline the process I take for listing a product. It’s just so efficient and rad that I feel I must share it with you. Before I even start full on content creation (read: overusing verbs like utilize and provide), I trawl the manufacturer’s site for their description, data sheets, drivers, and big images. Big images are important. Nobody likes to look at blurry stuff on the internet. It’s just not done. Once I find the info, I dump my haul out and start in on part number wrangling and pricing. For most products this is the easy part, just rote data entry on 3-10 part numbers.

Once that’s squared away, I pour over the data sheets and manufacturer’s description to pick out what I want the customer to know is most important about the product. And thus begins the fun of using my math education skills to write descriptions that tell the customer about the product and highlight the best parts of it. I haven’t created the equation yet, otherwise I’d just dump all the terms into excel and have it create the sentences for me. Finally, I format the imagery for our reqs and dump it all onto the site. An average product takes the better part of an afternoon to create, and about 40 minutes to list.

But sometimes there are products that throw a wrench in my system such that it takes 3 solid days to get everything together. The only images available are 20×20 thumbnails, the descriptions are single sentences of “This is a barcode scanner. buy it”, or there are so many variations on the product that 5 hours are eaten just in squaring away part numbers and pricing.

The S4M, with the 50 part numbers I’ve found so far, falls into this category. This is special territory, and puts it in ranks with the Symbol MC70 and Intermec CN3. It’s not bad that there is this much variance within a product line, oftentimes it prevents consumers from paying for features they neither need nor want. I can see where it could cause problems for newer or less immersed consumers. The last thing I like when I’m researching a relatively major purchase is to have 5,000 slightly different choices. And now, as a quasi-shiftless Product Manager, it turns a quick product listing into a 3 day job.

Writing Descriptions of Really Similar Products

A couple weeks ago, we met our new representative from Transaction Printer Group, or TPG. For the uninitiated, manufacturer representatives are people who get paid to fly all over the earth and talk about how awesome their existing products are, and how awesome their new products will be. They also buy us lunch the first time we meet them. I really dig on the lunch.

Anyway, TPG guy let us know they had two totally amazing printers available, the A798 and A799. They’re both incredibly similar, down to coming in the same body. One’s super fast, can print in two colors, and I think it’ll even do your taxes. The second one is half as fast, only prints one color, and is more budget oriented. And it was up to me to write two unique product descriptions to make them both sound worth buying.

Generally, I’ve found the best method to approach this situation is to write about the lower end model first. Then it sounds awesome, but the better product sounds AMAZING. It helps me to focus on the strengths of both products as opposed to only seeing the differences between the two.

Unfortunately, I was still pretty out of it after a business excursion and decided to put the fancy printer up first. There’s a post it on my desk now to let me know to never do that again.

Oh Snap I’m Writing all Over the Internets

I’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to cover my dealings in other arenas – lab management, phone support, general gibberish. And so this blog will be the third or maybe tenth iteration of my attempt to share with you, the internet viewing public, my trials and tribulations regarding work life and the weird stuff I encounter and may even be proud of.

To give some better insight, I’m the Product Manager for posguys.com, an online point of sale retailer. If you’re really in the know, you could call me a Product Manager for a value-added reseller, or VAR. The value I add to the company is a tremendous amount of cheeky one-liners and incredibly obtuse references, both in conversation and in product listing. I also end up learning about every new product in development for major manufacturers, and how they can make your business run super efficiently. If you have questions about what scanner will work best in a tire factory or what cash drawer goes best with a white wine, I’m your guy.

One of the most recent developments, and really most entertaining, at POSGuys is that I’ve been given greater artistic license when writing up product reviews and product spotlights. This means you end up seeing goofy stuff like our product development team using homing pigeons to determine what to list on the site. I had been using a similar writing tone when announcing products to the sales staff and was getting a positive reaction on all fronts.

Generally, technical specifications and ideal usage environments are kind of dry topics to cover, resulting in many people responding to my announcements with “too long; didn’t read.” By mixing it up when writing announcements, using a horrible mangling of the English language and vague pop culture references, I found people started responding to the side references as well comprehending the full specs I put into the announcements.

With that, hopefully this is the first of many posts covering the odd situations I encounter during my day-to-day, and maybe an outlet for some of that pent-up goofiness that courses through my veins.