A Clever Use of QR Codes to Help Students Log In

First introduced in 1994 in Japan, QR codes never quite took off in the U.S. It may speak to our impatience that whipping out a smartphone, launching a scanner app, and focusing the camera on an image of pixelated square proved too big a hassle. But perhaps people have been focusing on the wrong target audience for this technology. Clever, a San Francisco, CA-based startup, think it’s found the right users: K-12 students. The company best known for developing APIs that help 51,000 U.S. schools manage and provision user accounts from over 200 education technology companies is unveiling a new product: Clever Badges.