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Comment by GolDDranks | Hacker News Reader

Something I learned recently: the phrasing "QR Code" is a trademark of a company called Denso Wave, who invented them. While the method of producing and reading QR codes is free for all, (Denso Wave waived their rights to the patents) they still protect their trademark. This has lead many Japanese companies that use QR codes, to call them publicly something else, such as "2D codes", in fear of getting sued.

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Huh. Turns out it's a subsidiary of the same Denso that's a massive automotive supplier and largely owned by Toyota. Asian conglomerates are so interesting.

IIRC they created them in the first place to make manufacturing easier

Nothing compared to european conglomerates, which do wastemanagment, auction horses and build fighter jets...

I dunno, marital aids (sorry, muscle massage wands) and nuclear reactors is a quirky mix.

> marital aids

Vibrators. Hitachi is also known for their powerful, corded vibrators (it's not a dirty word): the Magic Wand.

Calling these 'marital aids' in 2023 seems a little outdated. Vibrators are devices used for sexual stimulation, which obviously makes them extremely useful for solo masturbation as well, in addition to being a sex toy someone can use on another person.

Too right! Also great for men as well as women.

All magic wands are amazing (not just the hitachi ones, but try to find a decent brand like hitachi, bedgeek). Trust me guys, they're so good in many spots; treat yourself!

Vibrators have a lot of interesting heavy industrial uses. At massive scale, things like paint mixers are massive vibrators. I had a college friend whose job title on LinkedIn for many years was "Vibrator Engineer" due to specialization in that industrial field. I don't think any of the vibrators they worked on were "personal sized" and I doubt any of the companies on their resume had any plans to sell sex toys, but that was an industrial/mechanical engineering specialization important enough to those companies to be reflected even in job titles.

Relatedly, my favorite Japanese product line enigma remains Yamaha realizing that all the finely specialized industrial equipment for building organs and pianos could probably be multi-tasked to making motorcycles.

I have seen them called "Quick Scan Code" or something similar in some ads.

Interesting bit of info, thanks for sharing. Sadly for them, I think the genie is out of the bottle on this one; while I've seen a few people use alternate names, most call them QR codes.

In the Chinese world, it's still called the equivalent of 2D code in Chinese(二維碼/二维码). The original variant QR Code(QR碼/QR码) are used but to the best of my knowledge they are quite mixed together in terms of usage.

I think the mainland Chinese are more inclined to 2D code by the interactions with them in the past.

3D codes will be rad

Could be something like "2d barcode" that got shortened to "2d code" cause there was not really any bars.

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