MEDIA ADVISORY: Linking Print to the Web via Mobile Phones: A Comparison of Digital Watermarking, Fingerprinting and Barcodes

Washington, DC, March 30, 2009 — The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) released a white paper today to aid the mobile industry in distinguishing between the various technologies available to identify the content of printed media and seamlessly link to related resources in the digital world. The DWA is an international group of industry — leading companies involved in commercializing digital watermarking solutions.

The DWA white paper, titled “Enabling New Mobile Applications: A Comparison of Technologies,” educates the reader on the three main technologies currently used in applications for mobile phones to enable interactive printed materials: digital watermarking, digital fingerprinting and barcodes. These technologies leverage the mobile phone as a portable computing device, enabling users to use the phone’s camera to link from an image in the physical world to a related video, Web site, promotional opportunity, or additional information on a product or subject.

“While many members of the mobile community are aware of these exciting technological advances, we believe that market adoption and implementation depends on a complete understanding of the scope and nuances of each technology,” said John Utley, Chairman of the DWA. “The purpose of this paper is to educate businesses, marketing firms and advertising agencies considering these new applications on the strengths and capabilities of each technology, and expose them to the significant marketing potential enabled by interactive print.”

The white paper is now available for download at http://www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org/

About Digital Watermarking
A MultiMedia Intelligence study identified digital watermarking and fingerprinting as a key growth market that could surpass $500 million by 2012¹. Digital watermarking is the process by which identifying data is woven into media content, giving it a unique, digital identity. Imperceptible to the human senses yet easily recognized by special software detectors, a digital watermark remains constant even through recording, manipulation and editing, compression and decompression, encryption, decryption and broadcast — without affecting the quality of the content. Digital watermarks can identify copyrighted content and associated rights, during and after distribution, to determine copyright ownership and enable rights management policy while enabling innovative new content distribution and usage models. Today, digital watermarks are broadly deployed with billions of watermarked objects and hundreds of millions of watermark detectors in the market, supporting various commercial and government applications.

CONTACT: For media inquiries, please contact Delisa Reavis of RH Strategic (Tel: 202-585-0210; e-mail: dreavis@rhstrategic.com).

About the Digital Watermarking Alliance
The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) is an international alliance of industry leading companies that deliver valuable digital watermarking technology and solutions to a broad range of customers and markets around the world. Member companies include aquaMobile, Civolution B.V., DataMark Technologies, Digimarc (Nasdaq: DMRC), Gibson, ISAN-IA, MarkAny, Media Sciences International, Streamburst, Thomson (Euronext 18453; NYSE: TMS), Université Catholique de Louvain, Verance, Verimatrix, and Widevine Technologies. For more information, please visit www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org

¹ “Beyond Traditional DRM: Moving to Digital Watermarking & Fingerprinting in Media Monetization” published by MultiMedia Intelligence, January, 2008.