NEC Corp, having entered the digital watermarking arena last year through work at its Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey (CI No 2,852), has spun off a new business unit to compete against the two main watermarking firms IBM Corp and Digimarc Inc. The new company, called Signafy Inc, will develop and market the technology for use in protecting the copyrights of multimedia and Digital Versatile Disk, DVD content, including still images, video and audio files, transmitted over the Internet, intranets digital satellite and cable. Signafy will be run as a venture start-up, and management and employees will have unspecified equity capital in the company. It hopes to announce various product releases and partnerships within the next six months, and will be collaborating with NEC on DVD watermarking products to promote the technology.
