August 16 – by Peter B. Counter
This week fingerprint biometrics solutions took the industry news spotlight as a slew of second quarter financial results collided with mobile security speculations. Eyeballs, not to be outdone, received some endorsements, and smart card identification documents are starting to replace old paper IDs in South Africa.
Here is the biometric week in review:
Apple might do to the fingerprint scanner what it did to the touchscreen what seems like so many years ago when it released the iPhone and had everyone tapping glass to check their emails. Thanks to the persistent rumors that the next iPhone will include a fingerprint scanner in its home button, stock in fingerprint authentication solutions providers like Precise Biometrics has been receiving a notable boost. Among the companies benefiting from the smartphone gossip, hot off of it’s remarkable second quarter, is Fingerprint Cards AB, who this week made good on promises of expanding staff in preparation for a profitable 2014 with the recruitment of a new vice president of strategic planning and portfolio management.
Another fingerprint solutions provider making news this week was BIO-key International, with second quarter results that left CEO Mike DePasquale a little disappointed: the cloud-based biometrics company taking in approximately 21 percent less revenue in Q2 2013 in than in the same period last year. This decrease in sales didn’t prevent BIO-key from winning achievements, however, with the announcement that Frost & Sullivan has bestowed upon it the 2013 Award for Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership. Continuing forward, BIO-key also integrated with it’s third Allscripts platform, bringing biometric security to electronic health records in Ohio.
It wasn’t all fingerprints in the news this week. Peter O’Neill sat down for an in-depth interview with James Hammond, Winthrop University’s associate vice president of information technology, about the school’s choice to implement iris scanning security across the WU campus in the for of ‘EagleEye’ stations.
EyeLock, looking to capitalize on the biometrics boom, positioned itself to further enter the market in Asia, while strengthening its posture in America with two new hires late in the week. On top of that, fresh news coming from NIST’s IREX IV report from earlier this summer made a strong endorsement for MorphoTrust’s iris scanning solution, giving eyeprint biometrics a brass ring in a week covered in fingerprints, with the Safran company being singled out for having the most accurate solution tested in the study.
Finally, news from South Africa: thanks to a government partnership with Datacard Group citizens will be able to trade in old paper identification documents for new, versatile and secure smart card IDs. Currently there are 27 locations across the nation at which citizens can apply for the new biometric documents which are said to only take 10 days to process as opposed to the 47 that used to take to receive a barcode ID.
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