A Brief History of Barcodes

1948 It’s 1948 and Norman Joseph Woodland has a problem. A graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology, he’s supposed to be teaching— but he can’t stop thinking about a simple problem: how to automatically distinguish between products at checkout. After a few false starts involving ink that glows under UV light, he quits his…

Using Barcodes for Asset Tracking

Ah, barcodes. From their humble roots in morse code and 1920s movie sounds systems (really) to their present ubiquity in stores, railroads, factories, and biomes everywhere, these funny little collections of lines help to organize and streamline processes the world round. As you can imagine, we’re rather fond of them. So in our iOS 2.1.0…

Powering Legislative Advocacy Using Airtable: Andrew Cates

Shaking up systems and battling bureaucracy is the job description for Andrew Cates, General Counsel and Director of Government Affairs for the Texas Nurses Association. The TNA, founded in 1907 and located in Austin, is a statewide, professional association of licensed nurses. And every day, Cates fights to protect the workers’ rights of 250,000 nurses…

Airtable for iOS Gets a Whole New Look

That’s right: we decided it was time for an upgrade. Starting today, there’s a whole new Airtable available for iPhone users. (Android and iPad users — we have something for you too! Click here to sign up for our beta.) So what’s new? Bringing Design to the Database Databases get a bad rap. They’re often…