Security Printing and Imaging : authentication, brand protection

World Economic Forum Selects Four Track and Trace/Anti-Counterfeiting Companies

StevenSimske — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:35:00 GMT

Recently, the World Economic Forum has selected 34 companies for special notice as "Technology Pioneers". Please see

http://www.weforum.org/en/Communities/Technology%20Pioneers/index.htm

The selections are based on the following criteria:

"The World Economic Forum has announced 34 visionary companies selected as Technology Pioneers 2009 for their accomplishments as innovators of the highest calibre, and whose technologies will have a deep impact on business and society. The selection of these companies is the result of a vigorous selection process, for which the Forum received more than 320 applications from around the world that were evaluated by 44 global technology experts."

Of these 34 visionary companies, 4 of the 15 in the "IT" category are companies providing products in Track and Trace/Anti-Counterfeiting (TT/ACF). These four pioneers are:

1. Advanced Track & Trace
www.advancedtrackandtrace.com
Jean-Pierre Massicot, Chief Executive Officer
Advanced Track & Trace is a pioneer in digital security solutions applied to Brand Protection.

2. Mojix, Inc.
www.mojix.com
Dr.Ramin Sadr, Founder & Chief Executive Officer - read the interview
Mojix, Inc. was founded in 2004 by a team of former JPL/NASA scientists and engineers with the vision of applying breakthroughs in deep space communications to exponentially refine the precision, reach and scope of RFID technology.

3. MPedigree
www.mPedigree.org
Bright B. Simons, Chief Strategist
mPedigree manages the 1393 service, which has been deployed in Ghana since January of this year, and is the first system anywhere in the world by means of which consumers and patients can instantly verify the source of a purchased pharmaceutical at no cost, at the point of purchase, using standard mobile phones.

4. TraceTracker Innovation ASA
www.tracetracker.com
Ole-Henning Fredriksen, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer - read the interview
TraceTracker is the global information exchange for the food industry.

Each of these companies has a different story--bringing advanced digital security printing to the play (ATT), bringing remote sensing advances to RFID (Mojix), making a difference where the introduction to the Internet is largely via phone (MPedigree), or providing food information exchange (TraceTracker). The creativity and utility of these four companies in obvious, and the fact that fully 12% of the World Economic Forum selections are in TT/ACF this year is a clear sign that this is not a fringe, an add-on, a secondary consideration any more. For all the right reasons--product safety, product recall, consumer empowerment, brand protection, supply chain visibility, product freshness, and many more--TT/ACF is the disruptive set of technologies that will be what consumers expect in just a few years.

[Thanks to Justin Picard for the link]

Best wishes for the Holidays!

Steve

Can't be counterfeited? Watch me...

StevenSimske — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:49:00 GMT

Michael McDonald, a branding expert at HP, pointed out this WSJ article on the "watch that can't be counterfeited":

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122411896958338969.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Let's spot a couple of questionable aspects about their approach:

1. The watch "uses layers of invisible UV marking, laser perforations of some watch parts, special high-security inks, and other measures used to secure passports and currencies like the euro and Swiss franc." This is a focus on covert and forensic marks, none of which mean anything to the would-be snob who wants her friends to think it's genuine.

2. "The company, which produces about 18,000 watches annually, expects to make 800 Quai de l'Iles a year." Will the demand be higher than the supply? Absolutely. And, how many of those "demanding" the watch would rather pay $400 for a good fake than $29,000-$60,000 for the real thing? As Bono might muse, a $400 watch without the laser perforations is "even better than the real thing".

Don't get me wrong, I like that they're using microtext ("Tiny texts on the dials of some models -- illegible without the aid of a magnifying glass") and invisible inks (although it's not clear that they are using variable text and perforations, I'm assuming they've done that considering the expertise of their consultants). It may be, however, that they've failed to fully consider the ecosystem for authentication. Have you ever had a friend (insufferable or otherwise) show you an elegant watch and then wait for you to pull out your UV light and loupe?

There is, of course, part of the ecosystem for authentication they've addressed successfully. That of bad retailers trying to pawn fake Quai de I'lles as real. Those coverts and forensics may help there. Just so long as they don't issue a "come-and-get-me challenge" to would-be counterfeiters, that is.

Whoops, too late.

-->This appears to have given would-be counterfeiters an opportunity to get cracking on Vacheron's come-and-get-me challenge. Mr. Pfund, who is currently designing the 2010 series of the Quai de l'Ile, says, "They already have fakes of this watch. I saw one yesterday on the Internet. Of course, the movement is wrong -- a lot of things are wrong."

-Steve

Are You Making It Too Easy for Counterfeiters? Then, Let Me SLAP You!

StevenSimske — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:22:00 GMT

Acronyms and anagrams are excellent means to simplify a message and to provide easy recall of this message (thus, the word “mnemonic” [Greek origin]—assisting or intended to assist the memory). For example, in 3^rd Grade, I figured out that my last name was an anagram for “KISS ME”. And I conveyed this knowledge to all of my female classmates. Which, not coincidentally, leads us to discussing the mnemonic SLAP.

SLAP, in the case of producing an effective ecosystem for brand protection and anti-counterfeiting, is an acronym for Scalable, Logical, Analytical, and Progressive.

Scalable means that the solution you propose can be used on multiple production runs, multiple products (SKUs), and for a reasonable amount of time. Don’t try to “divide and conquer”—that is, don’t use a completely different approach on different products. It will confuse your customers, your retailers, and your inspectors. Not only will it make it more difficult for you to get good authentication feedback, but you actually may increase the perception that your products are being counterfeited. Product “A” has deterrents 1, 2 and 3 on it, but Product “B” has deterrents 4, 5 and 6 on it—hmmm, one of these is probably fake. Or, worse yet, the would-be authenticator simply tunes out—too complicated, not worth it, too hard to figure out how to authenticate the product. Keep the message simple, and use an innate moving target for deterrence rather than actually changing the target. Security Variable Data Printing (SVDP) is such an innate moving target. One can change the information embedded in the security print, but never change the way a user interacts with it. And, because SVDP affords so many different means of embedding trackable and authenticable data, it is innately scalable, as well.

Logical means, well, think! Don’t make it easy on the counterfeiters. Here are some illogical approaches: (1) Spend a lot on your deterrent (counterfeiters love these “high margin” deterrents, because they’ll always knock them off more cheaply, and it decreases your margins while increasing theirs); (2) Use a deterrent/approach for only a short while and then stop using it (now your would-be authenticators don’t know what to expect—was it the old deterrent or the new deterrent, and which is legitimate). Much more logical: any time you roll out a new deterrent, which is unavoidable for some products—educate your authenticators; (3) Confuse different utilities in a familiar approach. Using variable data inside a hologram is one such example—most users think holograms are “variable” already, and aren’t likely to even notice the fact that one hologram is different from another; (4) Confuse machine vs. human readability. If you use a deterrent intended for machine reading, then embed data in a way that machines can read better than humans. And vice versa. Humans, for example, are very good at noticing alignment differences and relative color differences. Mach bands and other optical illusions are entirely invisible to machines. Machines are much better at noticing absolute color differences and of course steganographics such as watermarks. Meaning metamerisms are mainly meant for machines (alliterative, no?).

Analytical means your approach to the ecosystem should be geared at generating quantitative data. What is the compliance rate (i.e. what percentage of would-be authenticators actually try to authenticate)? What is the counterfeit rate? Read failure rate? If you can’t disambiguate these latter two—counterfeit vs. read rate, that is—you do not have an analytical solution. SVDP again underpins such an analysis: a counterfeit sample will generally have a different combination of print quality, print forensics and payload (data to be read) than a legitimate but unreadable—e.g. damaged, read with poor lighting, etc.—sample. Because of the multiple modalities—color, saturation, intensity, steganographics, halftoning, etc.—involved in printing, SVDP provides many on-ramps for analytics.

Progressive, finally, means that your approach allows progressively more complicated analysis to proceed smoothly. From an imaging standpoint, this means we move from image quality assessment (image “grading”) to image inspection to image authentication to, finally, image forensics. At each stage, a more in-depth analysis—and thus more difficult to reproduce—of the printed material is obtained. Making the first stage, image grading, relatively fast and painless, is an excellent way to generate “leads” from your customers. HP and many other brands address this by using “high-end” overt deterrents on their packaging. Customers are familiar with the motif—color-shift, thermochromic, etc.—and so notice when these have been unsuccessfully knocked off. Inspection ties layout and partial authentication to quality. Authentication ties the print job to the database of legitimate products. Forensics ties the data to the very material printed on, as discussed in my previous blog.

We can now add “SLAP” to the list of SVDP-related mnemonics, which also includes ACID (May 19)—All Content Is Dynamic—and PRACTICE (May 12)—Plan, Research, Activate, Collect, Train, Investigate, Convict, Evolve. Hopefully, this helps you recall a logical approach to brand protection. If not, well then, TTFN!

-Steve

Sustainability and Security Printing & Imaging

StevenSimske — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:16:00 GMT

Why is a blog on Security Printing & Imaging important? A short list includes the ease, flexibility and ubiquity of product authentication that security printing and imaging enables; the novel and interdisciplinarian research underpinned; empowerment of the consumer through increased access to many layers of product information; and sustainability. I'll review the first three, but for today's blog I will focus on the (most likely) surprise entry on that list: sustainability.

1. Ease, flexibility and ubiquity of product authentication

Branded products use printing to convey the brand, SKU, product information and other data of salience to the consumer. Often, the printing is performed on the package or label. In other cases, the printing is performed on marketing collateral associated with the product. In the case of single event items, the printing literally is the product--i.e. lottery, sports tickets, concert/event tickets, entrance passes, etc.--no printing, no value. Regardless, the printing is highly tied to the product, and so authenticating the printing, if done within the right ecosystem surrounding the creation and lifecycling of the printing, is tantamount to authenticating the product. This has been discussed in past blogs under security variable data printing (e.g. see "Universal Acid", 19 May 2008), or SVDP.

2. The novel and interdisciplinarian research underpinned

You've likely heard both sides of the argument for the Space Race, which culminated in NASA landing half a dozen times on the moon and declaring victory over the USSR (although the USSR won every other event in the Space Race, so perhaps it is told and internalized differently in Russia). Proponents credit the Space Race for the computer, for color television, Nixon's visit to China, Detente, and more. The political advantages seem more likely, since for technology the consensus viewpoint appears to be that "the United States long ago learned that the spin-off argument is a weak one; although developing spacecraft does produce some useful technologies, it is generally inefficient. If you want a faster computer chip, then develop one; there is no need to go to the Moon to do so" (http://www.thespacereview.com/article/137/1). Others would say, more pointedly, "$30 Billion and all we got from that was Tang"? (Don't get me wrong, I like Tang, but I doubt it took $30 Billion to develop).

However, in the case of security printing and imaging, it is much more credible to argue that attacking counterfeiting will benefit many other important areas of research, including but not limited to: (1) novel cryptographic systems, (2) inspection, (3) quality monitoring and assurance, (4) imaging in general [from surveillance to improved authentication techniques to multimedia/multimodal imaging technologies], and (5) technology hybridization (e.g. merging printing with RFID). In addition, many novel security-printing-as-printing approaches are certain to benefit next-generation printing in arenas from sensors to printed electronics to printed batteries. More on these and other printing research areas will be described in future blogs, but suffice it to say that security printing and imaging cuts across many important technological disciplines and, in so doing, opens the door to novel advanced research.

3. Empowerment of the consumer through increased access to many layers of product information

Do you want your customer to spend more time with your product? If not, you should. Because advertising is still the most effective means to draw customers to your product. Ask Google. Their market cap to revenue ratio is roughly twice that of Microsoft, and eight times that of HP. They empower customers through simultaneously providing information and advertisement.

A simple packaging example is the in-store battery tester. Built onto the battery, this is a risky sensor--what if the battery isn't juiced anymore? But it gets the customer to spend a few extra seconds with the product--in essence, it's advertising. Every second counts--customers are much more likely to purchase a product they have interrogated.

Mobile bar code providers are seeing the on-product barcode reader as another means to garner customer/product interaction. Stick around, there will be plenty more on this in future blogs, too.

4. Sustainability

For most people, "sustainability" rightly evokes environmental concerns, usually featuring food production, oil production and global warming issues. Food production (and its high use of fossil fuels) is rightly the first focus, e.g. as noted on http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/17/10414/, "This year’s dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is likely to be the largest on record and growing U.S. corn production is a primary cause of the worsening conditions, federal and state scientists said Tuesday"

But sustainability is also about not adding new environmental, fuel and/or complexity costs to a product. Let's face it, as described in (1.) above, you're going to print anyway. And, the printing stays with the package. You've added "nothing" to the environmental cost when you achieve security through printing that would have occurred anyway. As such, printing sustainability is assured through the extant approaches to recycling, repurposing, next-generation biofriendly inks, or from separating the label from the package.

Reuse is the best approach, but biodegradable recycling is a not-too-distant second. Take for example the introduction of biocompostable utensils--e.g. http://www.ecowise.com/index.php?cPath=22_187_195. This has changed the game for "to go" cups. So, will their be a biocompostable RFID? It is likely that RFID will always have a place in the supply chain, especially where line of sight is impractical or where track and trace is sufficient (authentication can occur elsewhere). If RFID can be printed with a biodegradable variable data print process, it will completely change the game for supply chain visibility and the marrying of track and trace with authentication.

Finally, sustainability can be achieved through the rationalizing of product recalls. That is to say, sustainability is also about not wasting. Ask yourself: Do product recalls help the planet? Only to the extent that they pull dangerous material off the shelf. But pulling everything off the shelf because some items are suspect is a huge waste. Recalls of counterfeited products right now are hampered by the lack of an effective means to determine what should be pulled from the shelves and destroyed, and what should be left there. Security variable data printing (SVDP) can provide "extra" variable regions that are used only when recall is required. These are not tracked, authenticated or advertised under normal circumstances, but are read and acted upon when there is a product recall. The surfeit of security marks that SVDP provides affords such an approach in a way no other security deterrent currently can. Remember that the same security features can be used for track and trace, authentication and forensics simultaneously. The nature and breadth of the SVDP features depends on how costly the product is, how skilled the inspectors/retailers used to manage the recall are, and how costly it is to with full confidence evaluate a potentially counterfeited product. Among other factors. But, the point is, it can be done (and is done).

Would you throw out an entire carpet because you dropped a staple? No, you'd try to vacuum it up. So, why throw out good product in order to make sure you've pulled all the counterfeits off the shelf? SVDP is the "recall vacuum". I highly recommend it as one of your brand protection expedients. It's a defensible--and sustainable--plan forward.

-Steve