This week at Mobile ID World we reported on new healthcare BYOD options, EyeVerify’s newest investor, 50 Cent’s newly announced heart rate headphones, fingerprint smartphones and mobile biometric banking. All of that and we published part two of our interview with BIO-key’s Jay Meier, this time touching on what he calls the Trusted Source, and how that might help us realize the true potential of consumer targeted biometrics.
On Friday, news from Australia revealed that St George Bank will be allowing customers to access mobile banking features with the Apple Touch ID fingerprint sensor. With the launch of this service, St George will be one of the first banks in the world to allow for fingerprint enabled mobile banking. Despite the high profile spoofing of the Touch ID sensor a year ago on its launch, St George Bank is confident in the security, citing liveness detection as a reason that it is more secure than any other type of available authentication.
Sticking with the topic of smartphones featuring fingerprint sensors, IDEX ASA announced the first design win for its new mobile touch fingerprint sensor. The IDEX sensor will be featured on the flagship smartphone of a second tier Asian smartphone which, as is the custom with this kind of news, will remain anonymous. The phone in question is slated for launch sometime during Q4 2014.
A newly announced collaboration between FIDO members Fingerprint Cards AB and Trustonic will be bringing strong authentication to connected devices at a faster rate. This specific collaboration will have FPC touch sensors – the FPC1020, FPC1021, and the FPC1150, the company’s new home button sensor – working with the Trustonic ‹t-base Trusted Execution Environment, allowing mobile device OEMs to easily offer secure fingerprint authentication on smartphones and tablets.
Wells Fargo announced this week that it is accepting applications for its Startup Accelerator: a boot camp for innovators operating in areas with the potential to shape the future of financial customer services. The twice-annual program will have Wells Fargo making a direct equity investment of $50,000 to $500,000 in each selected startup. Among the inaugural participants is EyeVerify, a startup championing its signature eyeprint biometric modality.
This week Mobile ID World also reported on a mobile solution tailored to healthcare verticals. Calgary Scientific’s ResolutionMD can be used in the clinical process to shorten diagnosis times without compromising security. It is a patient health information viewing tool that keeps all sensitive information on the hospital’s secure servers. Since the images and records are only viewed by the end-user device and not actually downloaded, a lost or stolen device becomes less of a security risk.
This week in wearable tech, we saw SMS Audio LLC – a headphones and accessories brand from Curtis Jackson (aka 50 Cent) – announce a collaboration with Intel Corporation that will have the musician’s in-ear headphones joining the wearable biometric revolution. Using a built-in optical sensor, the SMS Audio BioSport In-Ear offer persistent heart rate measurement, boasting the ability to dynamically remove noise signals caused by external factors such as body motion and ambient light.
Finally, we started the week at Mobile ID World reporting on the recently announced Q2 2014 results from ImageWare Systems. In addition to the financial numbers, ImageWare highlighted two company operations. First: the $1 million contract to implement a multi-modal biometric driver license system to the state of Baja California, Mexico. The contract will see ImageWare aiding in the deployment of the system at government offices throughout the state. Secondly, the company highlighted what it describes as “a three-year agreement in principle with major international retailer to provide multi-modal biometric identity management on the Fujitsu Cloud.”
Stay posted to Mobile ID World this coming week as we join our sister site, FindBiometrics, in wrapping up our Road2BUP summer event coverage. Be sure to follow us on Twitter so you don’t miss a beat.
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