Neomedia Technologies, Inc.

Neomedia Technologies, Inc. (OTC: NEOM) was a publicly traded company founded in 1989 and headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. While it operated as a technology company, public financial records from its later years show it was very small. For example, as of September 2015, it had a trailing 12-month revenue of approximately $2.84 million and around 14 employees.

The company described itself as a pioneer in mobile barcode solutions. Its product offerings included the NeoReader barcode scanning application and cloud-based management platforms called NeoSphere and QodeScan, designed to allow businesses to create and manage mobile marketing campaigns using 2D barcodes. The core of its business was its intellectual property portfolio, which covered methods for using a machine-readable code, like a barcode, to access a resource on a network like the internet. An investor forum post from 2021 asserted that the company's revenue was almost entirely derived from patent litigation and licensing, and that its business declined after key patents expired, leading to a foreclosure on its assets.

As indicated by its record of three plaintiff lawsuits and zero as a defendant, Neomedia Technologies operated as a patent assertion entity. The company initiated litigation against large operating companies, leveraging a patent portfolio that covered early methods of linking physical items to the internet via barcodes. The tracked cases from the early 2000s were filed in the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Northern District of Illinois. Later litigation in the 2010s was filed in districts including Colorado.

The company's patent enforcement targeted the now-commonplace use of barcodes and QR codes for marketing and logistics. Its lawsuits named major corporations like The Home Depot, Amazon.com, and Symbol Technologies. One of its key patents, U.S. Patent No. 6,199,048, was targeted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Patent Busting Project," which resulted in a re-examination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that narrowed the patent's claims. Critics claimed the company's litigation campaigns created a chill on the use of QR codes, a technology whose inventors at Denso Wave had intentionally not enforced their own patent rights to encourage widespread adoption.