This week at Mobile ID World we brought The Road to Biometrics UnPlugged to a close with a summer-long roundup of the feature articles and news items published in preparation for summer event’s titular interactive executive summit. We also had exciting national ID news out of Nigeria, the announcement of another pair of heart rate measuring headphones and more.
Africa’s largest financial inclusion program entered its pilot phase this week, with Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan receiving his own MasterCard branded national eID card. The newly launched financial inclusion pilot will see the Nigerian Identity Management Commision issuing similar eID cards to 13 million Nigerian citizens. Each card comes outfitted with 13 applications, including biometric identification features from Cryptovision and MasterCard’s prepaid payment technology, both of which are key factors in Nigeria’s financial inclusion roadmap.
ImageWare Systems announced this week that it will be providing its cloud based, multi-modal biometric identity management product suite – IWS CloudID – to a major international retailer thanks to a newly signed three year contract. The deployment will begin in the retailer’s Mexico City locations this September, and the suite will be running on the Fujitsu Trusted S5 Cloud Platform.
In wearable tech news, Jabra – a communication and audio solutions company – announced this week that it will be throwing its hat into the heart rate headphones race with the Jabra Sport Pulse Wireless earbuds. Like other in-or-on-ear vital biometric devices, the Sport Pulse Wireless earbuds are targeted at exercisers wanting to optimize their workout time. In addition to the heart rate sensors, Jabra’s biometric earbuds come with a built-in app to make accessibility easier on the user while allowing for the planning, tracking and evaluation of workouts.
In an effort to drive mCommerce, Verizon Wireless announced that it has selected Danal – a carrier integrated mobile commerce solutions provider – to provide its Mobile Identity Platform and tackle security related mobile payment adoption obstacles. The platform will provide Verizon with device identification, fraud prevention and consent-based mobile account details, inevitably leading to a secure and convenient end user experience during mobile online transactions.
This week, a mobile operator in Japan that can boast over 63 million subscribers chose digital security provider Gemalto for its NFC offering. The operator, NTT DOCOMO, will be receiving an end to end solution comprised of Gemalto’s Allynis Trusted Service Management service and the UpTeq NFC UICC. With the launch of the resulting solution, new secure and convenient opportunities will be available to NTT DOCOMO customers including mobile payments, loyalty programs, e-ticketing and access control.
In an attempt to capitalize on the rapidly growing mobile fingerprint market and reach profitability in 2015, Precise Biometrics announced this week that it will be focusing operations through increased market presence, efficient use of its partner network and the reduction of market expenses. According to the company, to strengthen its position in the mobile fingerprint biometric landscape, Precise Biometrics will be focusing the expansion of its development, market presence and sales efforts mainly towards Asian mobile phone manufacturers.
Finally, Trustonic and SecureKey announced that in order to expand and enable next generation security in connected devices, the companies have partnered, combining the former’s ‹t-base Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with the latter’s briidge.net Connect services. According to Olivier Leger, Trustonic’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, SecureKey’s user friendliness will play a key role in what he refers to as “leading the identity revolution”.
Stay posted to Mobile ID World in September as we bring you from-the-floor coverage of Biometrics UnPlugged and this year’s Global Identity Summit in Tampa, Florida. Be sure to follow us on Twitter so you don’t miss a beat.
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