COMMERCIAL NEWS

San Francisco, CALIF. — Cobion GmbH (formerly ONLY Solutions GmbH) inaugurated operations of its Global ImageCenter, the largest indexed database of online images in the world. The ImageCenter, powered by a 500 CPU parallel processing supercomputer, is the engine behind Cobion’s unique image-based brand protection services. It is supported by an integrated array of high speed databases which index 30 to 50 million images from the Web each day. (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000830/SFW003 )

The Global ImageCenter is the largest installation of its kind in Europe, and one of the largest in the world. It also ranks as the world’s largest active library of Web images.

“Although our ImageCenter is architecturally impressive, its real function is to do the heavy lifting of image collection, analysis, indexing and searching to support our services for our customers,” said Joerg Lamprecht, Cobion Chief Executive Officer. “With tens of millions of images added to the Web each month, the ability to collect and analyze them with precision requires high-speed processing and complex data integration. It’s what you have to do to offer the level of brand protection and other services that Cobion provides.”

Industry experts estimate that up to 9% of all products sold worldwide are counterfeit, amounting to $250 billion in annual losses to consumer and luxury brands, software manufacturers and music distributors. Online counterfeit sales may total $25 billion annually worldwide, according to the International Chamber of Commerce. This total is roughly twice the amount of legitimate online retail sales in the United States. For global brands, Internet counterfeit sites poses an even deeper threat by diluting and tarnishing brand equities that have been built over decades with craftsmanship and customer service.

For brand protection, Cobion compares corporate logos, marks, logotypes and other brand symbols with possible counterfeit or infringing images from the Internet. Cobion’s technology is unique in that it is able to find both images and text within images. It returns thumbnail images of potential conflicts in browser-based reports, with the results ranked by relevance. Because they are immediately visible, infringements are startlingly obvious. Companies can refine their searches by targeting geographic Hot Zones or particular sets of web addresses.

In addition to brand and trademark protection, the ImageCenter powers other advanced services offered by Cobion. These include detailed image searches across the Web, deep image searching for objects within pictures, advanced filtering services for portals and destination sites, face recognition, a new level of rich context searching by optical character recognition, and other applications.

Cobion is a leading provider of products and services in image detection and recognition for applications in business, communications, information and entertainment. The company’s advanced technology applications operate over the Internet, video, and streaming media. They include deep image searches and OCR rich context searches for particular images, symbols, signs, faces, or words within text. Specific applications include detailed image searches across the World Wide Web, in video footage, and in streaming media; brand protection; real-time brand building; fine-grain filtering services for portals and destination sites; trademark searches; copyright enforcement; protection of licensed media properties; and packaged entertainment products. Please visit the Cobion website at: http://www.cobion.com .

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