Digimarc Claims A Guinness World Record

Digimarc's own Ed Knudson and Sean Calhoon have claimed the Guinness World Record for fastest time for scanning and bagging 50 products. What's the real story? It's that Ed and Sean have no experience as checkout clerks.

Ed and Sean were required to scan and bag 50 items, switch positions midway, have exactly 10 items per bag, and print out a receipt for the scanned items. They achieved this feat in a world record breaking 51 seconds! The previous record holders performed the task in 75 seconds.

With no experience as checkout clerks or bagging, Ed and  Sean were able to do this with ease thanks to Digimarc'd packaging. Instead of having to spend time looking for traditional barcodes (UPCs) on the side of the packaging, that product information was invisibly embedded on all sides of the products, considerably speeding up the checkout time. This technology is ready to go today and could speed up checkout times dramatically in retail settings. In addition, the same Digimarcs that power the checkout information can be used to generate mobile engagement experiences like those currently associated with QR codes, eliminating the need to have the bar or QR codes (usually a pretty ugly design element) on the packaging at all.

[Discover more about Digimarc for retailers]

With a lot of buzz around the broken record and the new tech, the only question is which retailer will be the first to get their hands on it and claim the benefits of super charged checkout.