At the beginning of the millennium, product authentication was mainly done with a special tool or with the naked eye. The former solution was reliable but cumbersome while the later became less and less useful as simple copies became very good.
Then, the smartphone appeared and triggered a totally new path for authentication: since everybody had one, it suddenly became possible to get the best of both worlds: easy to detect and secure. The basic idea is this: smartphone captures an image and provides a conclusion regarding product authenticity.
A dedicated authentication tool is not anymore required, an expertise in the field is not anymore required and a visible feature is not anymore required neither.
Indeed, a machine can detect things that a human being cannot see. And in practice this invisibility provides many benefits to the brand owner:
- The bad guys don’t know what to look for it becomes therefore way harder for them to reverse engineer
- Invisibility means a very low signal strength which makes counterfeiting become way more difficult as bad guys need a high-end reproduction technology as well as an excellent expertise to duplicate the security feature (both of which counterfeiters are usually reluctant to invest in)
- If the detection application running on the smartphone is not in the public domain, the bad guys do even not know if there is something (and at AlpVision we know that this enables to reach unprecedented levels of security)
- The marketing team of the brand owner is happy because we do not change the look of their products (indeed some people may refrain from buying their usual product if it does not look… well, as usual)
- As a brand owner, you remain free to stop putting the feature on your product without the customer being alerted. By contrast, take the case of a visible feature like a hologram: you are a brand owner, once you start adding holograms on your product and inform all of your customers that the real thing has this feature, then you can never remove it. Ever. Or your customer will think you are selling a counterfeit…
- For all these reasons, we believe at AlpVision that invisibility is a good characteristic for security features, and this belief is shared by our numerous customers who have been using either our AlpVision fingerprint technology or our Cryptoglyph technology.
For 15 years.
Without one single case of counterfeit.