This past week saw Google announce its wearable technology OS: Android Wear. Already with support from Motorola and LG, Google’s new commitment to smartwatches is making a good case for the convenience of having an additional device mounted on your wrist. Going beyond fitness tech, Android Wear looks like a really cool way to keep track of social media notifications, internet news, SMS, phone calls music and the weather, but it also poses an interesting opportunity for those interested in identity management. Read more in out list of five ways that wearable tech can bolster strong mobile authentication.
One of the biggest and most publicly visible challenges of consumer mobile biometrics has been providing adequate liveness detection. This week at connect:ID in Washington DC, NexID was showing off its new technology agnostic liveness detection software. Mobile Live Finger Detection does exactly what its name implies: any time that a finger is submitted to a smartphone’s fingerprint sensor, the software scans for signs of life before allowing the print to be compared with the templates that will allow for authentication.
Staying on the topic of software, Extreme Reality has released its Extreme Motion SDK for Android. The development kit will allow videogame developers to incorporate biometric full body motion capture into their projects. The technology is already at use in the popular mobile game GO DANCE by SEGA, and is available for use through a revenue share agreement, so that even the most indie of indie game developers can add biometrics to their entertainment.
Though this week was home to CARTES Asia, plans were already being announced for the North American iteration of the secure conexions event. Planned to take place in Las Vegas from May 13 to 15, CARTES America promises to place a special amount of attention on mCommerce and mobile payments. Offering two full tracks to be held over two days, the announcement of the focus comes at an appropriate time: in a few weeks Samsung will be launching its Galaxy S5 smartphone with biometric enabled PayPal payment functionality.
ImageWare Systems released its Q4 2013 results this week, reporting increased revenue for the period over the previous year’s fourth quarter. Looking to an optimistic future, mcomapny CEO and chairman Jim Miller commented:
“We are starting to see a shift in companies evangelizing biometrics, moving from the small biometric companies trying to prove their practical application in the commercial and consumer markets, to many large corporations understanding the real-world benefits of bringing biometrics to the mainstream public. This shift has created an attractive opportunity for ImageWare and we plan to leverage our large partners’ sales and marketing power to capitalize on it.”
Meanwhile at findBIOMETRICS, mobility started to sneak into the news as well, particularly with the release of an upgraded physical access control management platform from EnterTech Systems that will now allow customers to use smartphone-as-credential factors in their security infrastructure.
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