Hi Buck,
Good to see ya! I hope this brings some action, <VBG> and it was on the news.
S U M M A R Y
Both cell phone
and machine
translation
technology took
giant leaps
forward last
week.
Smart Card, Smart Phone Commentary
By Mark Anderson
Special to ABCNEWS.com
LET'S CALL THEM ‘E-PHONES'
I have been writing about
bringing authentication, and therefore
e-commerce and Net transactions, to cell
phones for a couple of years now — either
by using smart cards or, eventually,
biometric techniques such as fingerprint
recognition. Since authentication is the
key to providing e-commerce through
wireless phones, let's just call these
“e-phones.” You are going to see scads of
them in the future.
Last week saw another big step
toward the first commercial models of the
e-phone, with an announcement by France
Telecom of a mobile e-commerce trial
using smart-card-enabled phones among a
group of participating banks and retailers.
The two-step purchase process entails
obtaining data from vendors of products
and services on the phone, via voice or
text, and then conducting a secure
purchase by inserting a smart card into
the phone, entering a personal
identification number and executing the
transaction.
The presence of the card makes it
unnecessary to transmit the PIN beyond
the phone. The smart card itself
recognizes the PIN and allows the
transaction, making it, France Telecom
claims, more secure than most Internet
transactions. The phone being used in the
trial is a Motorola StarTac-D, one of the
smaller phones on the market.
Motorola's director of mobile
commerce business, Joachim Hoffman,
released news of a similar trial set for
Britain in the near future, with
Barclaycard and cellular provider BT
Cellnet. A U.S. trial is possible by years's
end.
Bringing this capacity to cell phones
will provide a step-function change in the
type, number and value of transactions on
the Net. Let's look for early European
adoption of this technology in the first
half of 2000, with the United States about
6-12 months behind, at least. Don't forget,
in the United States, we're still wondering
what smart cards are. I would add this
application to the pressures leading to a
breakout for these devices in the next 12
months in the U.S. market.
more.abcnews.go.com
steve
ps, The phone... Message 11053890 |
