Portland. The city best known for their beards, beers, and birds is also a town of Food Nerds (for the record, I mean that as a compliment). Portlanders love their food carts, anything sustainable and bacon.

Portland Monthly highlights Portland's love of food in its March issue featuring 60 meals under $20. Also included in the March issue, is this week's Scan of the Week! Portland Monthly uses Digimarc's menu button overlay on a Nahm Prik Ong image. After scanning the image, readers can download a shopping list for making Nahm Prik Ong and can watch a recipe video. In this example, Portland Monthly demonstrates how you can have multiple engagements from one watermark. Congrats again to Portland Monthly for providing succulent, interactive content in their latest issue.

Our young friend, Patrick, who we think is really amazing, wrote us another letter to let us know that the Discovery Channel/3M Young Scientist Challenge is complete. He had a great time, learned a lot and thanked Digimarc for our support of his project.

Our pleasure, Patrick. Good luck in the future!

And here's an interview of Patrick with a shout out to Digimarc (yes, sorry, the volume is quite low...):

Digimarc Discover has been used throughout MyRecipes America's Favorite Cookbook. Just looking through the pages makes me hungry. Does drool on the page count as a watermark?

Holly Granger, food editor at MyRecipes.com does an incredible job explaining how Digimarc technology is used to enhance the cookery. Click on through to watch a video and see how.

I'm on holiday right now and soaking up the sun. But you know what? The machine of mobile commerce doesn't take vacation! I just wanted to quickly share a link from the good folks over at Mobile Marketing Daily. The North American market is really starting to see some saturation of "mobile magazine codes," as they call them.

What I love is that Digimarc's technology gets equal billing in the second paragraph, sandwiched right between QR codes and Microsoft Tags.

Oh, and the issue of Seventeen magazine they're talking about? That's right, digital watermarking! If you don't have the issue handy, simply watch the video below.

Our young friend, Patrick, who you may have read about with his science fair success here or here, has recently contacted Digimarc with more good news!

He s has been selected as one of ten national finalists for the 3M/Discovery Young Scientist Challenge. Patrick has been working hard on his project all summer, expanding on using our digital watermark technology to help prevent errors using over-the-counter medicine.

Patrick was even featured in the Illinois State Journal Register, although he's quick to add that his brother Darren was not a semi-finalist, and it was Digimarc that actually created the mobile phone application (that's okay, we'll share credit, Patrick.)

Another big round of congratulations to Patrick and his ingenuity!

Do you ever get the feeling that you say the same thing over and over, and maybe you'd be better off just writing it down and reading from a script? Well, somebody just scripted words straight from within my head... saving me the trouble of typing word after word. All I have to do here is write a short little blog post that links you to a much longer blog post. Mr. Roger Marquis at iMedia Connection has recently published an excellent primer on all the things we've been saying these past few whirlwind years: What Agencies Need to Know About Print to Mobile!

(exclamatory emphasis added)

Public and private universities often market themselves with print and television ads, targeting potential students across the country and even the globe. These ads usually contain a photo of the campus, a logo and slogan and a web address. Although these ad elements are great for catching someone’s attention, they force those interested in learning more to remember or write down the web address and search for more information on their own in the future.

While many potential students will visit the institution’s website after seeing the advertisement, many more will never take action. How can colleges disseminate more information and reach out to more potential students in a quicker fashion? The answer is digital watermarking.

Digital watermarks bring advertisements to life by providing a fast and easy way to access additional information about a product, organization or idea via the Digimarc Discover smartphone app.

In just one print advertisement, multiple digital watermarks (or “hot spots”) can be embedded that will instantly link interested students to various webpages that contain useful information about a school. It is a great way for educational institutions to showcase all they have to offer with just one simple print ad that is not cluttered by a sea of QR codes.

I recently read an article over on Mashable about what The Atlantic is doing to enhance their print experience. While I did like the fact that a “155 year old magazine” is doing something that’s only existed for the past few years, I had a chuckle at the multiple updates appended to the article.

There definitely seems to be a little confusion about what AR, aka ‘Augmented Reality’ actually is. For those of us in the industry, we generally hear the term “augmented reality” and associate that with apps like Junaio, which produce some cool 3D graphics that appear to pop-out from the page.  To produce the AR experience in an app like Junaio requires downloading complex files to run (which take a long time to load) and keeping your mobile device perfectly positioned over the page so the AR experience lines up. You CAN move your AR app away from the page, but moving your phone from the page diminishes the experience and the AR effect is lost.

Some have called Digimarc Discover augmented reality, which — although we don’t use that language in our brochures and such — we’re fine with the association. Because, really, we enable an enhanced reader experience in print just like Augmented Reality except our solution is easier to use, widely known, and a more affordable option for publishers, brands and agencies.  Let’s not forget — we are the pioneers of connecting attractive print content sans QR codes.

Our friends and innovators at House Beautiful have done it again! On Monday, they launched the world’s first Pinterest-enabled publication. That’s right, you read that correctly. House Beautiful has the world’s first Pinterest-enabled publication!

While you process this information, let’s take a refresher course for those who haven’t heard of Pinterest. Pinterest is not just a pinboard style social networking site, but it’s the third largest social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest hit 10 Million unique users faster than any standalone website... ever! Pinterest recently raised 100 Million and has valuation at 1.5 billion. So yeah, Pinterest is pretty huge.

In the June issue of House Beautiful, readers can use House Beautiful’s HB connect app (or the Digimarc Discover app) and re-pin photos from the House Beautiful Kitchen of the Month pinboard to their personal pinboard. Readers can now repin photos immediately, without needing to track down the photos online. Digimarc’s Print-to-Pin solution enables magazines, advertisers, retailers and others to drive Pinterest fanatics from printed materials to their Pinterest pinboards.  

Ladies and gentlemen... this is just the beginning. Pretty soon you’ll be able to repin images anywhere using Digimarc Discover. Buckle up publishers, advertisers, celebrities, brands, and retailers. This is about to get Pinteresting!

A while back I posted about an 8th grader who won first place at a regional science fair. Patrick's project incorporated digital watemarking as a means to help deliver dosage information for OTC drugs. If you missed it, you can read it here. Well, that young man was invited to the state science fair and I'm very happy to say that he got 1st place again. Even better, he received an award for the "Best in Category" for Behavior Science which included over 200 projects.

Congratulations young man! Digimarc is very proud of your acomplishments. He's now entered his science fair project in the 3M/Discover Channel contest. Best of luck! A future entrepreneur or scientist is certainly among us.

He told us that the judges asked him why it's not happening today... We agree! Someone get a move on it!