PicScout and Digimarc Join Forces
PicScout Ltd and Digimarc Corp Press Release
PicScout and Digimarc Partner to Enhance Image Tracking Combined offering to deliver dramatic improvements in image monitoring on the Internet.
Herzeliya, Israel, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, 27 April 2005. PicScout Ltd and Digimarc Corp (NASDAQ: DMRCE) announced today a new partnership combining image recognition and watermarking for online image protection and monitoring. As part of the partnership, Digimarc will begin using the PicScout Internet crawling technology to power the Digimarc ImageBridge MarcSpider search. The companies have also started a joint development project that is expected to be completed in the next six months to enhance Digimarc ImageBridge with PicScout’s image recognition technology. The joint development will be funded in part by the BIRD foundation www.birdf.com, which is an Israel - U.S government foundation whose mission is to promote and support industrial R&D between Israeli and US companies.
“By combining two leading technologies of watermarks and image recognition we truly strengthen the ability to protect and track visual assets. We are excited about the opportunity to work with Digimarc and expand our offering to current and future Image Bridge customers”, said PicScout’s CEO Eyal Gura.
“We welcome PicScout as a key ImageBridge partner. The addition of PicScout’s image matching capability to ImageBridge means we will be able to find more of our customers images on more web sites”, added Scott Carr, President of Digimarc’s Watermarking Solutions division.
In addition to the technology licensing and development agreements, the companies also signed a reselling agreement allowing both companies to resell their joint products.
About PicScout
PicScout is [www.picscout.com] a leading technology provider to the stock photography industry. The company offers solutions for image owners to control and protect their images in the information age. PicScout’s image recognition solution enables the comparison of image databases to individual images which are being used on commercial websites. Based on this technology, PicScout provides a number of services to the stock photography industry. These services enable stock photography agencies and photographers to better control their assets, enforce copyrights, develop new billing methods and increase their customer base. PicScout monitors over 3 million images for the world’s most prestigious image libraries.
About Digimarc
Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRCE), based in Beaverton, Oregon, is a leading supplier of secure media solutions used in a wide range of security, identification and digital media content applications.
Digimarc provides products and services that enable the production of more than 60 million personal identification documents, including two-thirds of U.S. driver licenses and IDs for more than 20 countries. Digimarc’s digital watermarking technology provides a persistent digital identity for various media content and is used to enhance the security of financial documents, identity documents and digital images, and support other media rights management applications. Digimarc has an extensive intellectual property portfolio, with 189 issued U.S. patents with more than 4,000 claims, and more than 400 pending patent applications in digital watermarking, personal identification and related technologies.