Thinfilm Electronics is teaming up with the world's customs agencies to make a new wireless tag to authenticate products and fight global counterfeiting and piracy.
Oslo, Norway-based Thinfilm makes electronic chips that can be printed onto thin plastic rolls, resulting in tags that can be placed like stickers onto products. It's a replacement for the old bar codes on products, but it works better because it is tamper-proof and can communicate data via near-field communications (NFC), or short-range wireless links, the company said.
Thinfilm is announcing today that its products will be the first NFC solutions to be included in the World Customs Organization's anti-counterfeiting tool.
"Counterfeiting is a major global problem that impacts a range of industries including pharmaceutical, technology, food and beverage, retail and more, with 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies affected," said Davor Sutija, chief executive of Thinfilm, in a statement. "We believe NFC OpenSense can play a significant role in helping the WCO to combat illicit trade and the growing threat it poses to our society and economy."
The Norwegian company is gearing up for production of billions of tags so that it can modernize the world's tracking and inventory management systems. It has teamed up with Xerox to manufacture the tags.
Thinfilm has created its NFC OpenSense and NFC Barcode products to help brands detect counterfeits and confirm authentic products. Customs officials and consumers alike can use an NFC-enabled smartphone, tablet, or industrial reader to read the tag on a product.
With 179 member countries, the intergovernmental WCO is the international authority on customs-related matters. The group uses its Interface Public-Members (IPM) global database to authenticate products for brand or rights holders around the world.
Thinfilm launched its NFC OpenSense tags in March. These are printed NFC tags that will tell you if a product's seal has been broken when you scan the tag with your smartphone. Products that are being shipped between countries will get a Thinfilm OpenSense tag. The tag has a round sticker on one side and a long tail sticker on the other side and is placed on the product near where the packaging opens with the long tail (the sensing loop) extending over the opening.
If the product is opened during transit, the sensing loop will break, triggering a communication that says "Open." When the product arrives at customs, customs officers will scan the Thinfilm tags with NFC smartphones to determine whether the package has been opened and therefore will know if the container has been tampered with and if its contents are potentially counterfeit.
Last fall, Ferd AS, a Norwegian financial and industrial group, invested $23 million in Thinfilm. A year earlier, the company raised $24 million from investors including Invesco Asset Management. Thinfilm was started as a division of Norway's research company Opticom. Opticom also created a technology for search dubbed Fast Search and Transfer. Microsoft bought that for $1.3 billion in 2008. By that time, Thinfilm became a separate entity, and it worked closely with Intel in readable-writeable memory to apply it to printed electronics. It has raised $100 million over the past decade, and it still has $40 million in the bank.
