By Maxine Most, Principal, Founder, Acuity Market Intelligence Biometrics has been considered on the verge of a significant breakthrough for more than ten years. In spite of relatively uninspiring industry results, recent developments – larger and wider scale adoption, significant capability and performance advancements, standards development, and consumer acceptance–indicate looming and substantial market expansion. How […]

By Patrick Hearn, Oberthur Technologies With the change in administration in 2009 it’s likely there won’t be much activity with smart cards in the federal government. Existing projects will continue forward but new ones will most likely be stalled for at least a year. But that doesn’t mean the industry will be standing still waiting […]

Taiwan has begun issuing Republic of China electronic passports, making it the 60th country to produce the secure passports. The new passports comply with the standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization. However, the country’s current machine readable passports can still be used until they expire. The new passport contains a contactless chip and antenna […]

WS Packaging Group Inc. and ASK, have formed ASK-intTag, a joint venture that will manufacture and market contactless cards and tickets for U.S. and Canadian markets. The new company will be the print silver-based inlays on paper, the composition of which is highly resistant to forgery. ASK-intTag will produce a range of products for markets […]

Oberthur Technologies received its first large-volume order for its federally certified dual interface cards from the U.S. government. The dual interface card, named ID One Cosmo v5.5 128K D, is a single chip multi-application smart card micro-controller with two communication interfaces – contact and contactless. It is designed for identity and government market needs. The […]

By Steve Owen, vice president of sales and marketing, Identification Business, NXP Semiconductors Everywhere you look, the impact of the economy has put a major strain on our industry. We are facing many challenges in the drive to grow, or even just maintain, our business models in automatic fare collection, access management, ticketing, e-government, NFC […]