Digimarc Discover Blog: All Things Digital Watermarking

Pinterest and the Future of Print Publications

Matthew Szerencse — 2012-05-22T09:07:18-07:00

Our friends and innovators at House Beautiful have done it again! On Monday, they launched the world’s first Pinterest-enabled publication. That’s right, you read that correctly. House Beautiful has the world’s first Pinterest-enabled publication!

While you process this information, let’s take a refresher course for those who haven’t heard of Pinterest. Pinterest is not just a pinboard style social networking site, but it’s the third largest social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest hit 10 Million unique users faster than any standalone website... ever! Pinterest recently raised 100 Million and has valuation at 1.5 billion. So yeah, Pinterest is pretty huge.

In the June issue of House Beautiful, readers can use House Beautiful’s HB connect app (or the Digimarc Discover app) and re-pin photos from the House Beautiful Kitchen of the Month pinboard to their personal pinboard. Readers can now repin photos immediately, without needing to track down the photos online. Digimarc’s Print-to-Pin solution enables magazines, advertisers, retailers and others to drive Pinterest fanatics from printed materials to their Pinterest pinboards.

Ladies and gentlemen... this is just the beginning. Pretty soon you’ll be able to repin images anywhere using Digimarc Discover. Buckle up publishers, advertisers, celebrities, brands, and retailers. This is about to get Pinteresting!

Update! Digimarc Helps 8th Grade Science Fair Project Win 1st Place!

Ben Bounketh — 2012-05-09T06:30:00-07:00

A while back I posted about an 8th grader who won first place at a regional science fair. Patrick's project incorporated digital watemarking as a means to help deliver dosage information for OTC drugs. If you missed it, you can read it here. Well, that young man was invited to the state science fair and I'm very happy to say that he got 1st place again. Even better, he received an award for the "Best in Category" for Behavior Science which included over 200 projects.

Congratulations young man! Digimarc is very proud of your acomplishments. He's now entered his science fair project in the 3M/Discover Channel contest. Best of luck! A future entrepreneur or scientist is certainly among us.

He told us that the judges asked him why it's not happening today... We agree! Someone get a move on it!

Digimarc for Images & Travel Photographer of the Year

Digimarc — 2012-05-08T16:06:53-07:00

Digimarc for Images is committed to the photography community, especially travel photographers! We like to live vicariously through all the adventures and exotic journeys they get to go on — all in the name of "work." To highlight our committment, we are a proud sponsor of the Travel Photographer of the Year (TPOTY) contest, "The premier travel photography awards and your showcase to the world."

The following banners were provided to Digimarc to help by TPOTY to help showcase our involvement. Can anyone tell us what kind of whale/dolphin that is???

"How to Create Hot Spots" Videos Now Online!

Don Haaga — 2012-04-09T12:09:40-07:00

One of the really creative things you can do with watermarking is to place multiple digital watermarks within a single image. This creates multiple "hot spots" that your readers can explore within a single interactive item.

Creating multiple hot-spots requires only a good layout application, a Digimarc Discover account to create the web services and watermarks; Photoshop can be used as well. You can find YouTube videos for creating hot-spots with InDesign here or using Photoshop here. Or to see a video of how this unique functionality can be well appled, watch here.

While the image embedded to the left only features a single watermark that you can scan with your smartphone, if you download the PDF with multiple watermarks you can see this same image with 6 watermarks. Each of these watermarks has a pop-up text overlay to tell you where it links to, the vest, the jewelry, etc. and tapping on the screen will take you to that product. In a way the printed page responds to a smartphone with a reader app like a website and mouse-ing over links.

Can you imagine this same image with 6 QR Codes on top of each product to create the same affect? Not something an advertiser would want to see. The really nice thing about multiple watermarks within an image is that you don’t need a quiet zone like a QR code; they can be placed next to each other. If anything you will want to make sure not to put too many watermarks within a small area which may confuse the reader. While watermarks can go down to a 1” x 1” area we recommend keeping the watermarked areas at least 2” x 2” for ease of use.

Digimarc Helps 8th Grade Science Fair Project win 1st Place!

Ben Bounketh — 2012-04-04T17:10:29-07:00

A few months ago a sharp 8th grade student named Patrick reached out to me, inquiring about the use of digital watermarks on over-the-counter (OTC) drugs to deliver dose information. He believes this would help reduce the number of dosage error found in pharmacies nationwide. Always willing to help out a budding technologist, Digimarc gladly supported this project. I'm happy to say he received first place in his regionals and is off to the State Science Fair at the University of Illinois very shortly. Nice job, Patrick!

The research project focused on 80 subjects and described how a large percentage of people misinterpret how to take OTC drugs. Patrick also had lots of good data quoted from various sources. He mentioned how deaths from accidental medicine misuse had increased by 350% over the last twenty years and the number of deaths from OTC drugs today exceeds the number of deaths from illegal drugs.

He digitally watermarked a few OTC drug labels that had confusing dosage instructions and provided links to videos that demonstrated. A large number of his subjects preferred that over the printed and sometimes confusing instructions. We agree 100%!