Jellifish Internet Services Ltd

Point of Sale Glossary

Bar Code: A bar code is a machine-readable representation of information (usually dark ink on a light background to create high and low reflectance which is converted to 1s and 0s). Originally, barcodes stored data in the widths and spacings of printed parallel lines, but today they also come in patterns of dots, concentric circles, and text codes hidden within images. Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers or scanned from an image by special software.

Bar Code Reader Device: A barcode reader (or barcode scanner) is an electronic device for reading printed barcodes. Like a flatbed scanner, it consists of a light source, a lens and a photo conductor translating optical impulses into electrical ones. Additionally, nearly all barcode readers contain decoder circuitry analyzing the barcode's image data provided by the photo conductor and sending the barcode's content to the scanner's output port.

Charge-Coupled Device: (CCD) uses LED's instead of lasers as a source to read bar codes.

Chip and Pin Card: Banks and retailers are replacing traditional magnetic stripe equipment with that based around smartcards, which contain an embedded microchip and are authenticated automatically using a PIN. When a customer wishes to pay for goods using this system, the card is placed into a "PIN pad" terminal (often by the customer themselves) or a modified swipe-card reader, which accesses the chip on the card. Once the card has been verified as authentic, the customer enters a 4-digit PIN, which is checked against the PIN stored on the card; if the two match, the transaction completes.

Chip and PIN Programme: The UK programme to replace all credit and debit cards to cards with Chip and PIN capabilities.

EFT: Electronic funds transfer refers to the computer-based systems used to perform financial transactions electronically.

EMV: EMV is a standard for interoperation of IC cards ("Chip cards") and IC capable POS terminals and ATM's, for authenticating credit and debit card payments. The name EMV comes from the initial letters of Europay, MasterCard and VISA, the three companies which originally cooperated to develop the standard.

EPoS: Electronic Point of sale device which enables an efficient recording of the sale of goods or services to the customer.

Ethernet: Ethernet is a family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). The name comes from the physical concept of the ether. It defines a number of wiring and signaling standards for the physical layer, through means of network access at the Media Access Control (MAC)/Data Link Layer, and a common addressing format.

Intelligent Terminal: Till with touchscreen interface.

IPoS: Integrated Point of Sale

LCD: A liquid crystal display (LCD) is a thin, flat display device made up of any number of color or monochrome pixels arrayed in front of a light source or reflector. It is often utilized in battery-powered electronic devices because it uses very small amounts of electric power.

MSR: Magnetic Strip Reader

OPoS: Consists of a set of POS device interfaces sufficient to support a wide range of POS solutions.

Symbology: The mapping between messages and barcodes is called a symbology. The specification of a symbology includes the encoding of the single digits/characters of the message as well as the start and stop markers into bars and space, the size of the quiet zone required to be before and after the barcode as well as the computation of a checksum.

TFT: A thin film transistor (TFT) is a special kind of field effect transistor made by depositing thin films for the metallic contacts, semiconductor active layer, and dielectric layer. The channel region of a TFT is a thin film that is deposited onto a substrate (often glass, since the primary application of TFTs is in liquid crystal displays).

USB: Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a serial bus standard to interface devices such as computer peripherals.

Value Added Reseller (VAR): A company that adds some feature(s) to an existing product(s), then resells it (usually to end-users) as an integrated product or complete "turn-key" solution. This practice is common in the electronics industry, where, for example, a software application might be added to existing hardware.