Gavin Janke
As an engineering director at Microsoft Research, British-born Gavin Jancke oversaw the development of a diverse range of IT technologies, including High Capacity Color Barcodes.
High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB) is a technology created by Janke at Microsoft for encoding data in a 2D graphic using clusters of colored triangles instead of the square elements conventionally associated with 2D barcodes or QR codes. Microsoft Tag is one implementation of HCCB using 4 colors in a 5 x 10 grid.
In a 2020 podcast, Janke reflected -
“Another project, which was of my own creation, called Microsoft Tag and this came from this color barcode technology that I had. And this was another kind of over-commitment challenge pickle that I got myself into whereby myself and a marketer from the X-Box team wanted to change the marketing barcode industry for consumer-user interaction with magazines and billboards and that kind of stuff. So I had this color barcode technology, which worked really well with the cell phone camera technology at the time. And we’re talking the late 2000s here, and essentially we made a pitch to the president and we got some brands such as cereal manufacturers really excited and essentially, again, I committed myself, oh, I’m going to create a product and we’ll launch it at Consumer Electronics Show on five different mobile platforms with a cloud back end with marketing tools for publishers to use and leverage and monitor campaigns and so, again, with an incredible set of committed people who covered my behind with this, we executed and we delivered and actually a thirty-person product team got created around this and the product actually lasted for several years and I’m going to make a bold claim here that it’s probably one of the most pervasive pieces of technology that Microsoft might have ever deployed in that fifteen billion color barcodes were printed and in circulation."
Eventually the product was sun-downed as business strategy changed… and it was licensed off to another company, but that was an incredible ride of my own technological creation with the color barcode and actually creating a workable platform.”
In 2013, Microsoft announced that their support of the TAG service would end in 2015. It was transferred to another company but has since fallen into disuse. Other high-capacity colour barcodes have since emerged but haven't seen widespread application... ...yet.