This month, we are proud to celebrate the 20th anniversary of AlpVision. AlpVision is a real startup story. From humble beginnings, working from a garage in 2001, AlpVision first started developments of obscure robust steganography technologies. Although these certainly worked great, they were not commercially viable. It took some time to realize that customers buy solutions, not technologies, and from there, time to find which kind of solution would be most useful.
The first prototype of the Cryptoglyph security feature was done with an HP office inkjet printer that could print a 2 cm x 2 cm pattern of yellow dots in 1 minute, taking a further several minutes to detect with a PC and a bulky document scanner. Nowadays, over 30 billion Cryptoglyphs are printed every year across the world in more than 200 industrial printing sites. Detection is achieved in less than 1 second on a smartphone by consumers.
In 2010, we were first able to use a web application to remotely report a Cryptoglyph detection by a user. In 2020 alone, our cloud solutions reported over 500’000 detections worldwide. Currently, the AlpVision Fingerprint solution is taking a similar growth path as the Cryptoglyph 20 years ago, with new products, customers and suppliers working with AlpVision every month.
Our detection system has also been vastly improved with the use of artificial intelligence. This will continue to provide an even faster and simpler distribution of our technologies worldwide. Our capacity of automatic fast recognition of products is also currently opening up new markets. At AlpVision, we are proud of our development over the past two decades and look forward to the next twenty years working with our customers to protect their products.
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