LaserCard will be supplying optical memory cards for use as green cards and border crossing cards for the Department of Homeland Security under a contract it has with Anteon Crop. It’s the third card production order the California company has received. ▸

Giesecke & Devrient has been awarded an 11-year, 23.5 million euro contract to supply 500,000 driver’s licenses, 1.8 million personal ID cards, and 1.5 million electronic passports to Macedonia. The republic is one of the first Eastern European countries to introduce a passport containing a chip (e-passport). ▸

Minnesota-based Identix has garnered a $800,000 contract to provide its full hand scanning equipment to California’s state and local governments. The purchase will help the agencies comply with the state’s new Proposition 69 which requires hand prints of certain felons and parolees. ▸

A panel of ID industry experts provided predictions for 2006. One of these glimpses into the future will appear here each day during December.

by Dave Ella, Vice President of Products, AMAG Technology

The security industry is seeing an increasing number of changes in what used to be the access control industry and is now security management. This is being driven almost entirely by technology – including smart cards, biometrics, the LAN / WAN and VPN (Virtual Private Network), digital video, and advanced video analytics among others. ▸

A panel of ID industry experts provided predictions for 2006. One of these glimpses into the future will appear here each day during December.

by Dominique Gauthier, Marketing Manager, software and technologies, Ingenico

This past year will remain in the payment industry history as The Year It Really Started. For the first time, the banking industry took seriously a technology it had regarded with distrust. After years of successes in the transit industry, the first massive deployments of a contactless infrastructure are happening in the U. S. Some 10,000 readers and several million cards are already active in this country. Most observers agree that 2006 will see an acceleration of these deployments in the United States, with probably 20 to 50 million cards issued by the end of 2006. ▸

Andy Williams, Contributing Editor

Some 100,0000 smart cards with optical stripes have been delivered to the States of New Delhi and Gujarat in India as part of the first phase of the country’s vehicle registration program. According to the supplying company, Luxembourg-based Gemplus, this will likely be the largest drivers license/vehicle registration project of its kind. With 100 million cards anticipated during the next five years, it’s going to be hard to top. ▸

The pinstriped lines of barcodes past are going the way of the vinyl LP – at least for many applications. Instead of the staid black-and-white bars, you are likely to find a chaotic looking area of scrambled dots. Thanks to the advances in tracking technology, barcodes have come a long way since their introduction in the early 1950s. ▸