Company ProfileIngenia Technology leaps ahead in the authentication sector
The first in an ongoing series in which we profile the winner and runners-up of the Global Security Challenge; this week, we look at London-based Ingenia and its unique laser method of authenticating almost any substance on Earth without adding a tag or interfering with production
The news that London, England-based Ingenia Technology was declared the winner of the 2006 Global Security Challenge has not yet swept through the world’s drawing rooms, but no doubt a number of companies in the authentication and anti-counterfeiting industry have been wishing for a nearby fainting couch. The company’s Laser Surface Authentication (LSA) system sends a shot across competitors’ bows by offering an extremely cost effective way of authenticating almost any type of product — all without having to add anything to the product or slow down production cycles. The Global Security Challenge hosted a number of intriguing new technologies — some of which we will be profiling in weeks the come — but we have no doubt Ingenia deserved to come out on top.
Ingenia’s LSA began, as so many great products do, as a search for something entirely different. Company founder Russell Cowburn, Professor of Nanotechnology at Imperial College London in 2005, was experimenting with nanomagnets that could only be located with lasers. This worked well until one of the magnets fell of the surface being used. Believing everything to be normal, Cowburn again applied the laser — yet instead of his photorecepting tool finding a magnet, it showed a strange array of peaks and valleys. He soon realized that almost every surface, even of identical products, reflected a unique pattern of what he calls “speckle” caused by microscopic irregularities in the structure of paper fibres or the setting of plastic. The speckle, company executive Mark McGlade tells us, can be thought of as “biometrics for things.”
Aside from clear glass, everything on earth contains speckle readable by Ingenia’s sensors. This makes them ideal for detecting almost anything that can be counterfeited, from dollar bills to Hermes purses. Attached to a production line, the LSA quickly scans a predetermined portion of the product and then populates a database with the speckle data received. No tags or devices are added to the product, nor does it touch it in any way that might slow manufacture. Indeed, speeds of up to twenty meters per second can be achieved. Best of all, as each scan requires only 125-750 bytes of storage space, the data costs are low. At 500 bytes per item, an entire year’s inventory of one billion items would occupy 500 Gbytes of data - just over one hard drive’s worth.
According to McGlade, Ingenia is now in the advanced pilot phase with a number of customers, including government agencies interested in passport and ID authentication, as well as from industries with server counterfeiting problems, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, and cosmetics among them. There might even be a market in the fine arts business, with gallery owners and collectors submitting their priceless Monet’s to be scanned as to avoid duplication and assist in custody disputes. He even sees a future in a low cost consumer scanner that would permit customers to authenticate products they bought on the Internet — a good idea considering how much fake junk is sold over Ebay.
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