 Recent Milestones
In 2004 the decision for the future strategic direction of the company was made. The Microglyph code technology was matured and the core business focussed on this innovative product. Partnerships with laser hardware suppliers have been intensified and implementations for their hardware-platforms have been developed. At this time, successful smaller applications and pilot projects have already been implemented at key customers in the automotive industry.
In 2005, a completely new second generation of the technology has been presented. The automotive division of the Robert-Bosch GmbH implemented the first applications in large series environments. Further strategic partnerships with reader manufactures have been established and numerous applications in the Direct-Part-Marking area could be realized.
End of 2006, another important milestone for microglyph was the step into the packaging industry. A worldwide unique process for controlling and monitoring of packaging machines with “invisible” codes has been developed in close cooperation with Huhtamaki, a specialist for innovative packaging solutions. In the packaging area, Kraft Foods successfully deploys microglyph for production of large series consumer goods since mid 2007.
Since mid 2008, the third generation of powerful microglyph codes and solutions is available. Beside many improvements and extensions, it opens up new types of applications, e.g. in the area of brand protection and anti-counterfeiting.
Patents
The Microglyph technology is protected by a portfolio of ca. 40 worldwide patents. The basic idea of the “Glyphs”, the left/right leaning lines for coding binary data, has been developed and patented by PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). PARC is a 100% subsidiary of Xerox corporation.
As worldwide exclusive licensee, Microglyph Technology GmbH has secured and licensed the foundation patents from Xerox/PARC, as legal basis for its development of the proprietary Microglyph codes. Xerox/PARC is technology partner for applications in the area of document management systems.
Xerox/PARC
Xerox Corporation - well known as “The Document Company” and famous for it’s copiers and printing machines has invented the Dataglyphs Code. Dataglyphs are a robust and unobtrusive method of embedding digital data on surfaces such as paper documents and are the predecessor of today’s Microglyph codes.
One of the common grounds of Dataglyphs and Microglyph are the basic code structures - the 45° leaning lines (Glyphs). Beside these common grounds, both are independent technologies. Xerox Dataglyphs have been developed with the background of paper oriented document management systems. Microglyph initially focussed challenging industrial Direct-Part-Marking and packaging applications. As the succeeding and newer technology, Microglyph is also applied in demanding applications in the paper document domain.
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