Brand Experience magazine partnered with the Active and Intelligent Packaging Association to organize an AIPIA Summit in June 2018. The event was held in Jersey City, New Jersey on June 4 and 5. The company, Labels That Talk, demonstrated a 2-D Barcode to Summit attendees during the event called Soundpaper. In the interview below, president of Labels That Talk Ken Berkun talks with BXP about this newest innovation.
You attended the AIPIA Summit, which Brand Experience magazine was a partner in, this past June. Talk to us about Soundpaper, and how you demonstrated that at the conference?
Soundpaper is a new, patented, high-capacity 2-D Barcode that encodes sound, HTML and more, directly onto paper or other surfaces, for example, product labels, packaging and photos; unique among barcodes, Soundpaper does not require a network to retrieve the audio, HTML or other content. Like other barcodes, such as QR codes, a URL can be included to take the user to a Web page, but unlike them, Soundpaper delivers content immediately, even when there is no Internet access. This situation happens more than most people realize; from the back of big box stores to large areas of the world with poor or expensive internet access. In other words, Soundpaper is the only way to deliver meaningful content under any and all conditions.
Because of its large amount of storage area, Soundpaper can do things other barcodes simply cannot. For instance, you can embed a public key signature to ensure that the Soundpaper barcode was created by an authorized person or organization and is safe to scan, again, without waiting for the time delay or security risk of going out to the Internet and back. This means that Soundpaper can serve as an important component of an anti-counterfeiting solution.
Soundpaper content can be serialized and personalized, making it useful for multiple purposes, including marketing campaigns, promotions, product instructions, anti-counterfeiting, track and trace, aids for the blind, talking photographs, and more. In addition, Soundpaper reduces costs by eliminating the need to print multi-ply labels, and replacing them with a single small Soundpaper barcode that can contain the entire text of five, 10 or even 20 page labels. Thus, you can “Go Green with Soundpaper!”
At the AIPIA conference in Jersey City, we demonstrated several of these Soundpaper capabilities. In one case, we showed how Soundpaper could be used to detect a counterfeit product through a Bayer Flea Collar. Bayer has been fighting counterfeit flea collars for nearly two decades. In another case we showed how an entire 16-page multi-ply instruction and warning label could be stored in a single barcode of less than 2 square inches. Our third demonstration showed how the (free) Soundpaper app could be used to detect that a website had been hijacked and was being used to lure the consumer to a fake website. Some of these capabilities are still in development and these examples demonstrated Soundpaper’s prospective uses.
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Soundpaper is a solution not yet in the market today. What steps need to be taken to make this solution a reality?
We currently have a beta app that we make available to prospects. Although development is proceeding on our product roadmap, additional work is needed to complete particular core and ancillary components. We are looking for corporate partners, including investors, willing to work with us to accelerate and complete final development and commercialize the technology.
The beta app, available on iOS only, demonstrates the basic audio capability plus non-audio content features such as HTML, text, graphics, etc. We are excited to be working with a local college this fall to have students complete the port to Android. This is a great opportunity for the students to get their hands on a real-world project and for us to move our product closer to deployment. We can make our product roadmap available to serious prospects and investors to show exactly where we are at today and what we need to complete the product.
How did Summit attendees respond to Soundpaper at the AIPIA conference?
The AIPIA conference attendees who we met with provided us invaluable feedback on our technology.
The information we gained from the sessions and the networking were extremely beneficial. We were fortunate to be selected to participate in the Bayer Challenge. We were able to present Soundpaper and highlight several of its capabilities that would benefit Bayer, as well as, giving the entire audience more insight into the benefits of Soundpaper. As the person up on at the podium doing the presentation, I was pleased to get immediate reactions from the general audience as well as the representatives from Bayer. Since then we have been in touch with Bayer and while our discussion is in its early days, this is a conversation that very likely would not have happened without the AIPIA conference.
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Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?
Soundpaper is a unique technology that has broad applications across many industries. The AIPIA conference in Jersey City was our first opportunity to discuss Soundpaper with industry experts in the field of intelligent packaging. We believe AIPIA offers an important service for its corporate members and solution providers such as ourselves to exchange ideas and learn from each other. We are grateful for the opportunity to participate in the event. One of the most fun things about introducing people to Soundpaper is that everyone we talk to has a new idea of how Soundpaper can be used. We acquired a number of new ideas from the attendees of this conference, which we are following up on. We encourage your readers who might have applications for Soundpaper to contact us so that we can demonstrate Soundpaper in person and move us closer to a full scale launch of the product.
