Digimarc
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| Public company | |
| Traded as | NASDAQ: DMRC |
| Industry | Technology |
| Founded | 1995 |
| Founder | Geoff Rhoads |
| Headquarters | 9405 SW Gemini Dr, Beaverton, Oregon, United States |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
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Key people
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Bruce Davis, CEO |
| Revenue | ~US$35 million (2013) |
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Number of employees
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170 |
| Website | www.digimarc.com |
Digimarc Corporation, a publicly traded technology company and inventor of several patented innovations, provides enterprise software and services for banking, retail, media, entertainment, publishing and several other industries.
Digimarc is perhaps best-known for its digital watermarking technologies, part of a portfolio of more than 1,100 issued and pending patents globally. Digimarc’s solutions enable the reliable, efficient and automatic recognition of objects and many media formats, a technology category known as automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) or “discovery.” Overall, the company promotes the concept of intuitive computing and aspires to make technology instinctively easy to use, and many of its innovations are modeled on aspects of human cognition and sensory perception.
Based on these principles, Digimarc invented Digimarc Barcode, a machine-readable code that is imperceptible – nearly invisible and inaudible – to people. The company also provides Digimarc Discover® software for detecting the information stored in the Digimarc Barcode. The technology can be used with several forms of content, including product packaging and other physical items, printed material including photographic images, and audio.
Digimarc's products and services are in the areas of security, anti-piracy, counterfeit deterrence, copyright protection, advertising and media monitoring and measurement, interactive publishing, content delivery, manufacturing quality control, mobile and embedded systems application development, digital commerce, inventory management and product packaging. Digimarc partner companies that license its technologies have developed many related applications.
Digimarc was founded by Geoff Rhoads, an astrophysicist with a background in deep space imaging. The initial inspiration for the company came while Rhoads was photographing images of the planet Jupiter. He felt that his digital images were vulnerable on the internet, even with copyright protection. In 1996, after initial venture funding, Digimarc released its first product: a digital watermarking plug-in bundled with Adobe Photoshop, Corel, and Micrografix. After a second round of venture funding and increased investments in research and technology, Digimarc signed a multi-year contract with a consortium of central banks.
Current CEO Bruce Davis named to the post in 1997. He had previously headed video game development companies, such as Activision, and founded TV Guide on Screen, developing it as the leading electronic program guide for television.
Digimarc went public in 1999 with its Initial Public Offering (IPO), offering four million shares of its common stock at $20 per share.
Digimarc has developed a DRM system used on bank notes of several countries. Developed for the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, the system embeds various hidden patterns into banknote designs which are detected by code included in several popular image editing programs, including Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Digimarc's system blocks users from opening images identified as bank notes.
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Wikipedia