30 October, 2002
category: Contactless, Education
Aix en Provence, France, October 30, 2002 – Inside Contactless today announces that the company was chosen by FortressGB, a leading smart card solutions provider, to be its supplier of PicoPass™ contactless smart cards and multi-standard contactless reader interfaces for its Smart Football Club solution implemented in the UK Manchester City Football Club at Maine Road Stadium.
Soccer is a global obsession, and a key source of revenue for each club is their stadium and much income is based around Priority Tickets, European traveller Club and Season Ticket sales to fans. But anyone who has ever gone to a game knows that the process of getting into a match is at best old fashioned, and at worst such as season ticket holders have no additional benefits or privileges.
FortressGB’s Smart Football Club scheme provides supporters with exciting and more secure football experience, while offering the football club better and more convenient tools to manage games as well as additional revenue stream.
FortressGB used for its solution implemented in Maine Road stadium
Inside’s PicoPass cards as well as the multi-standard contactless reader interfaces which can handle proximity and long range distance.
“Inside was the best answer to our needs, PicoPass offered the security, memory size, distances and convenience that we were looking for to implement our solution”, comments Mika Weinstein Lustig, VP Marketing and Business Development.
Manchester City’s project is still in pilot phase in the Family Stand for Smart Cards. The full solution will be rolled out in full for the 2003/2004 football season.
FortressGB is a leading developer and provider of turnkey smart card solutions and services. The company has renowned expertise in highly-secured multi-application smart card schemes for the education, sports & leisure, health & safety and aviation markets.
Eric Jouve, Inside’s Europe Sales Manager in charge of this project says: “From Secure Access-Control to Loyalty, Ticketing, Cashless, FortressGB shows once again its incredible expertise in combining all requirements in a unique & secure smart-card solution. We have been very pleased to share our know-how on this multi-application offer and bring a new dimension to the project with our contactless technology.”
Key technical features of PicoPass are:
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16Kbits of memory available for applications demanding quite a large memory capacity.
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Capability to operate at proximity (10 cm) distance at up to 424 Kbits/s speed using ISO 14443B standard for very fast access time and at vicinity (exceeding 1m distance) distance at 26 Kbits/s speed using ISO 15693 standard.
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Automatic detection of the communication standard enabling mixing of both communication modes within the same application.
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Flexible and configurable file structure with mapping of 8 independent 2K bit pages or a single 16K bit page with personalization capabilities.
About Inside Contactless
Inside Contactless is a pioneering semiconductor company 100% focused on the development of contactless products and markets. The company is a leading supplier of contactless chips and readers, offering a range of solutions for emerging markets like transport, access control, payment, identity, and electronic identification.
Inside Contactless acts as a one-stop shop for its customers by providing a complete contactless technology platform. Headquartered in Aix-en-Provence, France, and offices in Shanghai, China and Willmington
(Delaware, USA) Inside Contactless works with a worldwide customer base including system integrators, VARs and application developers. For more information, visit the company’s web site at
http://www.insidecontactless.com.