Thoughts on smart card Holy Grail chances . . . .
Right now we see one real market for biometrics -- the law enforcement market, which IDX is beginning to dominate in live scan. There is a smaller access/control market, and emerging applications in e-commerce (PC-based) as well as biometrically-secured smart cards (for POS and ATM terminals).
Why, if IDX has the most privacy friendly software, is it losing out in the smart card preliminaries to minutiae-based Identicator? I have a theory. Privacy concerns on the commercial side may be much less important for smart cards than for networked systems, for the simple reason that the biometrics is recorded once and carried on in the wallet of the smart card owner. How is that print going to be "stolen" for use in a police-state data base? I guess it could be done, but the cost of going after fingerprint algorithms one at a time is obviously prohibitive.
On the other hand, if a biometric is being stored with umpteen gazillion others on a server (whether intranet or internet), there is going to be a driving need for privacy and security concerns. Here, I think, IDX will be playing to a friendlier audience.
Now, it is entirely possible that the F3 technology, unavailable until now, has advantages like a small footprint that can knock out the commodity-level biometrics being proferred by Identicator or any number of other startup wannabes in the smart card market. But it would almost certainly come at a premium price. And will the public feel threatened by using a cheap, minutiae-based biometric when they know they are the only ones carrying it? There is a greater fear of Big Brother data bases "out there" somewhere than living in your own pocket on the smart card.
For these reasons, I'm beginning to think IDX has less of a shot at the smart card systems and more of a shot at the networked systems. Another advantage, here: The network systems are probably going to be a mass market before smart cards.
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