A new program at Louisiana State University, dubbed "Easy Streets," is designed to reduce the number of cars on campus and make it more pedestrian friendly. The program has been successful so far, except for a few small glitches. For example, some faculty and staff think they can wave their proximity access card over the reader and gain entrance. As one administrator commented: the gates have trouble reading a moving card.
"The main goal was to enhance safety by getting the traffic that didn't belong on campus out of there," said the university's director for Office of Parking, Traffic and Transportation."To the extent of that goal, it (Easy Streets) has been extremely successful." Read more here.
Students at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh have until the end of June to use up the vending dollars on their Titan cards, as the school starts rolling out all new proximity cards designed to provide easier and more secure access to buildings. The vending dollars account is being eliminated because it was confusing. Students will now have just one account, called Titan Dollars, on their campus cards.
While the vending accounts will be gone, students can still roll over whatever funds are left into their Titan Dollar account, school officials said. The move towards the prox card for door access will slowly be implemented over the next couple of years.
Read more here.
Higher One, a financial services provider to colleges and universities, has signed up 15 more institutions for its OneDisburse Refund Management program. That brings to 109 the number of schools using the Higher One platform, a 15% growth since the beginning of 2008.
While the University of Arizona has eliminated use of Social Security numbers to identify most students, there are still some–about 4,400–who cling to the Social Security numbering concept. That's going to change the last weekend in May when those numbers will be dropped in favor of the random-generation numbering sequence the university now uses, according to UA's student publication The Wildcat Online.
Even though Social Security numbers for the most part were eliminated about seven years ago, students could choose to continue to use their old number because, as one administrator commented, it was easier to remember. Most of the students with the old numbers are now grad students.
Read more here.
Issuing combined student IDs and bank cards on campus reduces the time it takes to get these multifunction cards into students’ hands, and it enables them to begin using the card the moment they exit the campus card office. But if that card was a branded Visa or MasterCard product, this hasn’t been possible for most issuers.
ID cards similar to those used on college campuses are making their way into the K-12 environment. The latest pilot, at a Florida elementary school on the state's west coast, involves a badge students wear that can be swiped to pay for lunches or to check out books. As this story points out, the ID badges can also help substitute teachers familiarize themselves easily with students' names.
However, looming budget cuts statewide could force postponement of this project, originally intended to be fully implemented next year. Read more here.
Some 9,000 students and 500 staff at the University of Colorado at Boulder recently were notified that their personal data housed on one of the university's computers may have been breached. A week later, the university declared it a false alarm. The problem was caused by an interaction between two incompatible software programs that mimicked behavior consistent with a malicious file, says the university's IT department.
When this behavior was first discovered, the university erred on the side of caution and notified the students and staff involved who then must have spent an anxious week or so wondering if their personal identity information, such as their Social Security numbers, were going to show up in the hands of ID thieves.
The university intends to beef up its security procedures including cleaning up computers that still may contain sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers. Read more here.
Campus card provider CBORD has released its latest CS Gold AdminWeb module that enables administrators to manage class schedules and privileges online without having a CS Gold GUI installed on users' workstations. This improves the remote accessibility to CS Gold for card office staff and reduces the time spent fulfilling requests from employees from other departments who can now access the information.
Two other advantages pointed out by CBORD: Its online format means card administrators no longer need to be in the office to carry out these tasks, and since AdminWeb resides on a web server, users always have the latest software.
Cyber attacks against a university that leads to ID theft are hard to prevent, but try telling your students that. There are some preventative measures colleges can take,including the obvious, such as limiting or eliminating use of Social Security numbers as identifiers. This article, originally published by the University Risk Management and Insurance Association last year, takes an in-depth look at ID thefts on college campuses and what universities are doing to prevent it.
Colleges and universities keep hundreds of thousands of constituent records in computerized systems and for them, the threat of this information becoming compromised is very real. Hackers are the most obvious causes of student ID thefts. But there are other methods: stolen or lost laptops, for example. There's also the case of a simple thumb drive containing student rosters that was stolen from a professor at a southern university.
"Protecting against identity theft and data loss is ultimately not unlike other risk mitigation on campus: identify the bad guys, identify what they are doing and how, and then take proactive steps to ward them off," say this article's authors. The article can be accessed here after you go through a brief, and free, registration process.
You need it to take tests eat, and make other purchases. So what happens when you lose your student ID card? At most colleges you pay a replacement fee. For Louisiana State University students, that amounts to $15, a figure some students don't like. Getting a card to last the eight semesters a student attends college could be problematic for some.
"It seemed a little expensive to replace," said one LSU student.. "I have to have it to take tests and eat."
Yet, it's hardly a cash cow for LSU, since it costs the university $11.49 to produce each card. The remainder of that $15 replacement fee goes into a fund for software and equipment upgrades.
Some 6,600 students contributed to that fund last year, LSU's The Daily Reveille reported. Read more here.
For the past few weeks, Brandeis University students have had the option of adding money to their student ID cards online using a credit or debit card. Prior to this new service, they had to write a check or pay cash.
The software implementing the new program is provided by the university's card provider, CBORD. The Web site also includes an "Invite to Deposit" option that generates a private link students can send to other individuals, such as parents, enabling them to add money to the account without knowing the student's username or password. Read more here.
Examining results from the UK's Chip & PIN rollout
With Chip & PIN well established across the UK, fraud figures are painting an interesting picture of its impacts. Is it really making a difference when it comes to the never-ending battle against fraud? Consult Hyperion's Richard Allen discusses card fraud in an EMV world with AVISIAN Executive Editor Chris Corum.
http://www.secureidnews.com/podcasts for older podcasts.
At least 75 Temple University students fell victim to an email phishing scam that put them at risk for ID theft. While the e-mail originated off the coast of West Africa, it involved a Palestinian account. Its intended purpose was to phish for information from thousands of people connected to Temple.
Some 5,000 students received the email asking them to confirm their personal information or their account would be disabled. The users were asked to send four items, including their user ID and password information, says a university spokesperson.
Read more here.
Students are key to making sure a campus is safe and secure. That was obvious during a recent drill at the University of Missouri, which locked down the campus.
The problem? Students equipped with their ID cards could still enter or exit their dorms, according to this report from a Missouri television station. While the red alert closed the doors on any outside threats, at least four students walked right through the front door.
"We tell our students all of the time that they need to be cautious...anytime the hall is locked they need to not be letting people come in behind them. That's hard for students to do sometimes," said a university spokesperson.
Read the complete story here.
Higher One, a refund management services provider for higher education, has joined the PCI Security Standards Council. The council develops the Data Security Standard with which merchants and service providers that store, process or transmit customer payment card data must comply.
In this time of budget cutbacks, donations mean a lot to a college's bottom line. That's the premise behind Heartland Payment Systems' Give Something Back Network that can be tied to a student's campus card and that's the reason Heartland was presented the Best in Payments Editor's Choice award recently by Cards and Payments Magazine.
Email or text messages and automated phone calls are being utilized by many colleges and universities to warn students of an emergency situation, specifically weather alerts or a shooter on campus. A Kentucky university is taking it a step further, using air raid-type sirens loud enough to override the ear buds of personal music players.
Unveiled on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the deadly shootings that took place at Virginia Tech, the system will involve mounting sirens on 50-foot poles at four locations around Murray State University, the Associated Press reports. Read more here.
A conversation with GlobalPlatform's Kevin Gillick
Around the globe, government ID leaders struggle with the myriad of standards determining which are key to their implementations. Host Chris Corum speaks with Kevin Gillick, Executive Director of the GlobalPlatform to learn how this not-for-profit industry group is helping agencies navigate these waters. International standards such as ISO, industry standards including GlobalPlatform specifications, and application standards like FIPS 201 are investigated.
http://www.secureidnews.com/podcasts for older podcasts.
Kathy Gallagher, director of Villanova University's campus card office, is a recipient of the Professional Development Award from the National Association of Campus Card Users. "The campus card is a vital part of everyday life at many schools," says Matthew Drummond, director, DukeCard System and chair of the 2008 NACCU Professional Development Award Committee. "Kathy and her staff have shown how creative uses of the card system can enhance the student experience."
Sallie Mae, the nation's top student lender, is not immune to credit woes, SanDiego.com reports. With its interest rate capped at 6.8% and with many of its competitors scaling back their student loan activity or withdrawing completely from the market, Sallie Mae is looking for help after reporting a first quarter loss of $104 million. It's particularly critical now since this is the time when many students apply for loans for the fall semester.
Sallie Mae would like the U.S. Treasury Department to aid the stricken student-loan market by purchasing securities backed by student loans. The U.S. House is due to vote Thursday on legislation that would give the Education Department temporary authority to buy loans from student lenders to ensure their access to capital.
Read more here.
CBORD customers will have an easier path to making online deposits to their existing campus card accounts thanks to the company's recently-inked agreement with JSA Technologies to utilize its patented Web-deposit system. The patent license agreement does not provide JSA with a license to use, interface with, or otherwise integrate with any CBORD product, the company emphasized.
More community colleges are joining the campus card ranks, not only to give students more services, but to increase security. Grand Rapids Community College, with its 15,000 students and 1,600 liberal arts and occupational courses, is bigger than many universities. And with more than a third of its enrollees commuting to campus, controlling campus access and parking had become a major chore.
Towson University in Maryland has joined the higher education institutions expanding their use of student ID cards off-campus. More importantly, the declining balance account on the student's OneCard will not expose its users to overdraft fees or credit card debt, the university emphasizes.
CBORD is going greener. The campus card provider is ramping up its green initiatives that began at corporate and expanding them to the company's annual users group conference that will be held Oct. 8-11 this year at the new energy-conscious Grand Hyatt in San Antonio, Tex. CBORD, based in Ithaca, N.Y., will also be doing its part, communicating by email as much as possible rather than producing printed brochures.
Have off-campus programs become a virtual necessity for card programs?
By Andy Williams
Contributing Editor
The decision to allow off-campus merchants, mainly restaurants and bookstores, to access students’ prepaid accounts used to be an easy one to answer: no way. But that attitude among colleges has been changing as more have found that on-campus income didn’t plummet as feared. Surprisingly, in many cases, it actually increased. Even one major campus dining provider saw that proverbial handwriting and two years ago acquired a company specializing in off-campus markets.
Text messaging to alert students about emergency events are great, provided they are delivered in a timely manner and aren't truncated so much as to render the original message worthless. Or, as in the case recently at Florida State University, encompasses more than was originally intended.
Recently, a text message sent out about a suspicious package in a particular parking garage on campus ended up listing just a parking garage, not a specific garage. This could have covered any of the school's parking facilities. The other problem was that the messages weren't received by many students until a couple hours after the incident was first reported.
Read more here from the school's student newspaper.
The Internet isn't like paper. It doesn't yellow with age, disintegrate or get lost. Somewhere, the information you may have posted–or may have been posted for you without your knowledge–is still available.
That's what a Texas A&M professor discovered with an old Excel spread sheet that had been used to organize grades 10 years ago. The students' names and partial Social Security numbers were still up there, ideal ingredients for ID theft. As this article in the university's student newspaper pointed out, "The past was still available to be robbed by the present, and it took the University 10 years to realize it."
Read more here.
Imagine filing your tax return electronically only to be told by the IRS that you've already filed. That's what 93 graduate students at the University of California at Irvine, recently discovered.
While police don't know how the students' identification information, primarily their Social Security numbers were obtained, the incident is just one of a series of nationwide breaches that led to a state law banning use of Social Security numbers as student identification.
Read the complete story here.
The Arbiter, Boise State University's student newspaper, calls student ID cards a "useful tool," a "key" vital to a student's life. Yet, their importance is often ignored by students.
Writer Eric Martinez asks: "Why do we tend to neglect such an important and useful tool that relates to campus life? Why do we find ourselves leaving our dorm rooms without it or leaving it at random places due to carelessness? Why is the picture so much better than the one on our driver's licenses? Your student ID card is more than just a card; it's a key. Any student who has participated in virtually any type of campus event should know this by now."
Read the complete story here.
Higher One's purchase of EduCard, which utilizes Intellecheck technology to provide colleges and universities with a stored value card, will expand Higher One's client base and product offering while streamlining its refund distribution process.
More Than 8,000 staff and faculty at the University of Minnesota will be using Secure SafeWord from Secure Computing to provide two authentication methods–a token that can automatically generate new passwords and a PIN. The new system will eliminate the need of employees to memorize multiple passwords when accessing the university's network.
Editor Zack Martin talks to Jeremy Grant, senior vice president and identity solutions analyst at the Stanford Group Company, about the Digimarc selling its identification business to competitor L-1 Identity Solutions. Digimarc had the majority of driver licenses business in the U.S., with L-1 in the second spot. With Real ID around the corner why did Digimarc choose to sell now? What does this mean for the driver license market? Listen and find out.
http://www.secureidnews.com/podcasts for older podcasts.
Editor Zack Martin examines the missing links in protecting and authenticating online identity for social networking sites, especially for minors. With sites like MySpace and Facebook having millions of users, some younger than ten years old, people want to talk about how to protect the children. But at what cost? And will strong authentication ever become mandated by the government for social networking sites much like new strong authentication requirements for financial institutions? All this and more during a discussion between Zack and host Ryan Kline.
http://www.secureidnews.com/podcasts for older podcasts.
To see an interview with Ashley Grills and her role in a MySpace scheme linked to a girl's suicide, visit ABC.com.
In the past nine months, 12 more schools, including community colleges, have chosen campus card provider Blackboard to help them manage their on-campus commerce and security needs. Most have opted for the company's full Commerce Suite that includes building access, video surveillance, cashless payments on- and off-campus, laundry services and parking.
With the help of financial services provider Higher One, Northern Arizona University is streamlining its refund distribution process that will enable faster payments to its students. They will now have multiple options to receive their financial aid refunds, including direct deposit to the their OneAccount, a Higher One no-monthly-fee checking account.
Secure ID provider HID Global is adding a line of accessories, including five types of badge holders, lanyards and vinyl strap clips, to go along with its ID card printers and encoders. The new lines, showcased at ISC West, are expected to be available by early summer.
Evaluating the reality of the hack from his perspective and industry insiders
In this episode, the publicized Mifare Crypto-1 hack is examined. Interviews with the researcher that uncoverd the alleged vulnerability, Karsten Nohl, as well as NXP representative Manuel Albers and Smart Card Alliance's Randy Vanderhoof delve into the topic from all sides.
Albers reports that between 1 and 2 billion of these chips have been issued to date and are in use in transit systems and security and access applications.
Nohl stated that he would wait until next year to make the complete nature of attack public, suggesting "if you are relying on Mifare security, you should start migrating." When asked if the intent was to give the issuers time to migrate or if he was holding the industry ransom, he replied, "I would acknowledge that we are playing along in the obscurity game ... we want every one of these systems to wake up and realize how insecure they are ... to convince the last ones that are still claiming we have not found it, we will have to release it."
http://www.secureidnews.com/podcasts for older podcasts.
Pennsylvania-based Villanova University has expanded its CBORD-provided campus card to include online laundry reservations and athletics ticket lotteries. The online laundry management solution allows students to search for available washers and dryers, view wait times for machines in use and place temporary holds on the machines. The athletic lottery geared towards the university's basketball program, includes a means of determining eligibility based on a number of factors such as past attendance records.
Annual CR80News survey shows growth rates drop by half from prior year
By Chris Corum & Andy Williams, Executive & Contributing Editors
The number of partnerships between campus card programs and financial institutions continued to grow in 2007, though not as rapidly as in recent years. The annual CR80News campus card/banking partnership survey reported a modest increase of 8% in 2007, down from 16% growth in 2006 and a 30% average growth in 2004 and 2005.
CBORD subsidiary Off-Campus Advantage has added three more schools to its off-campus payment program that allows students to use their campus ID cards to utilize services of local merchants. Each of the schools were already using CBORD's Odyssey PCS campus card solution.
After successful implementation of its software as a service model at a California dentist college last year, SmartCentric Technologies is rolling out its hosted service offering, which gives customers access to all of the company's smart card applications while reducing their investment in local infrastructure and hardware. The software is located offsite at a central hosted location and the software is accessed over the web using a secure connection. Card offices are now able to chose from any or all of the SmartCity Suite of applications including logical or physical access, Password Wallet, ePurse, and more. Biometrics can even be added for greater security.
Purchase jumpstarts payment processor’s entry into the college and university market
By Andy Williams, Contributing Editor
The recently announced purchase of campus card supplier General Meters Corp. (GMC) by payments processors, Heartland Payment Systems, has likely delivered the resources the small company needed to stay competitive.
Heartland’s campus card appetite was first whetted with its Slippery Rock University experience in mid-2007. The provider of credit/debit/prepaid card processing, payroll and payment services implemented a campus card program at the Pennsylvania campus that involved the ubiquitous cell phone and the campus card.
HID Global has teamed with Dynamic Card Solutions (DCS) to launch the CardWizard FCP 20/20 instant issuance financial card printing system. The system is aimed at banks, credit unions and retailers for on-site instant issuance of debit, credit and prepaid cards. HID’s line of Fargo’s HDP functionality offers superior card image quality, essential in the financial card industry.
Towson University, Maryland's second largest, will by the end of the month allow its students to use their campus cards for off-campus purchases, according to the school's independent student newspaper, The Towerlight. The university began implementation for the move off campus last fall but needed to work out electronic and banking issues, the newspaper reported. Off Campus Advantage, a subsidiary of the college's campus card supplier, CBORD, is handling the new program. Two restaurants have already signed up. Read more here.
Designing, creating and getting approval for a functional card office facility
By Andy Williams Contributing Editor
Space is usually a premium at most colleges and universities. So when Georgia Tech underwent an expansion of its card office a couple years ago, it realized it may need room to grow. James Pete, director of the Buzz Card Center, the name of Georgia Tech's campus card, a take on the university's Yellow Jackets nickname, compares a card office to what he calls "the Web effect. It will never get smaller, just larger and more complex as the years go by."
MultiHub, a Singapore-based dormitory management company, has selected XID Technology's facial recognition system to provide access control to the Soon Lee Dormitory.
In Singapore, dormitories are often used to house foreign workers working on construction sites. XID's solution was selected because it contains biometric facial recognition that can serves as a deterrent to people who may attempt to illegally gain access to the facility.
XID, a Redwood City, Calif. and Singapore-based facial recognition company, has face recognition technology that functions in outdoor environments where lighting condition variations result in high error rates for traditional face recognition systems.
Is a student ID card linked to a debit card made possible by the college's relationship with a bank hurting the students? That's one of the questions USA Today asked in its article available here. The issues cited focus on overdraft fees charged to students and whether the campus is "promoting" these fees by selecting bank partners based on the level of financial return committed to the campus.
Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (see story here) announced that his office is examining whether college students are being harmed by their schools' partnerships with banks that offer debit and credit cards.
Blackboard has announced the addition of video surveillance capabilities to its Blackboard Commerce Suite. The IP-based, digital video offering will be integrated with the existing access control and recently acquired mass notification functionality. The new addition will allow campuses to view live or recorded video from more than 80 cameras simultaneously, zoom images frame by frame, record video on demand at all times utilizing motion detection and receive automatic notification of events via email, handhelds or text messaging with the video clip attached.
One of the oldest identification technologies, barcodes, are still creating a buzz today. This time though instead of having a dedicated reader, companies are creating software that enables your phone's digital camera to function as the reader. Contributing editor Ryan Kline talks with Dennis Hettema of ShotCode and John Bulkeley of ScanBuy.
http://www.secureidnews.com/podcasts/ for older podcasts.
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More than 300 campus card and security personnel are gathering in Phoenix for BbWorld Commerce '08, a Blackboard-sponsored event for users of its Commerce Suite. Featuring record exhibitor participation, theme for this year's conference, which began March 9 and will run through March 12, is "Coming Together."
PockeTracker, the VisionBase-designed software that enables hand helds to log individuals in and out of events by reading their ID cards, has received Motorola validation, assuring customers and partners of system interoperability between Motorola devices and VisionBase applications and solutions.
To meet the growing demand among small and medium-sized businesses and colleges for secure, personalized cards, Zebra Technologies has unveiled its Zebra P110m monochrome card printer that's compact and affordable. Designed for those will smaller volume card printing requirements, the P110m also offers printer status and diagnostic messaging via a built-in LCD screen.
“Software as a service” model takes off
By Andy Williams, Contributing Editor
Colleges and universities aren’t that different from corporations. Educational institutions are under the same pressure to keep costs down, and anything that can be done to help institutions save money piques their interest.
That’s one of the big selling points of a relatively new concept called software as a service, or SaaS for short. Many may know it by its precursor: application service provider, or ASP.
Access Smart debuted Power LogOn Administrator 4.0 for educational institutions that includes features for identity management, cashless transactions, and building and network access using smart card technology.
Power LogOn Administrator is a security system that's based around smart cards. The card contains a users' passwords, credit card account information for transactions and other information that would enable access to data and facilities.
Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School in Washington has issued 1500 cards to date. Future plans for expanding the cards' functionality include cashless payments for purchases on campus, as well as a program for alumni to remotely access pertinent information. The Power LogOn Administrator Starter Kit starts at $129.99 for a card reader, software, smart card, and 30 time-limited licenses.
Some Minnesota school districts are getting on the biometrics bandwagon, enabling students to use their fingerprints to get a meal in the cafeteria or to check out a book from the library. At one school, according to the article in the Pioneer Press, the fingerprints, which are stored as a numeric template, can also be used to identify students when they get their medication in the nurse's office or go to a school dance. Read the complete story here.
Leading campus card provider The CBORD Group has been purchased for $367 million by Roper Industries, a company that provides engineered products and solutions for niche markets, including water, energy, radio frequency and research/medical applications. "As part of Roper we will have the financial and strategic resources necessary to pursue a variety of new initiatives," says CBORD president Tim Tighe. CBORD's management team will remain intact, according to Roper.
The 3,000 students at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland, will no longer need keys to access their dorm rooms. The students ID proximity card, which can be presented to wall readers, is all they'll need thanks to a Salto online door-locking system that has been installed throughout the campus.
Limerick-based Mary Immaculate College has chosen SALTO Systems campus access control system to provide advanced security management. The college awarded the contract to approved local SALTO business partner; DoorWare Ltd and its partner One Card Solutions.
Beginning with the spring quarter, students at the University of Chicago will start receiving a new ID card containing an RFID chip that will allow them to access buildings without the card ever leaving their wallets. Another major difference is that the card will be vertical, rather than horizontal, to better reflect the downtown Chicago skyline image which will be imprinted on the card. The card is also 20 times more expensive than the university's existing cards. Read more here.
A 261-room luxury hotel in the United Arab Emirates has chosen Salto Systems to provide electronic access to its rooms. The project is the first integration of Salto with HID iCLASS technology in the UAE and involved the installation of approximately 350 electronic locks, along with wall readers to control the elevators and 150 SaltoVirtual Network control units. They are also using electronic bracelets to control access to the gym and fitness facilities.
An innovative new technology that strengthens PINs and passcodes with one-time grids and Personal Identification Patterns (PIP) is explored. Executive Editor Chris Corum speaks with the technology's inventors and corporate leaders from GrIDsure on their new pattern-based unique IDs.
Please contact podcasts@avisian.com with any comments or suggestions.
Executive Editor Chris Corum welcomes new Editor Zack Martin to the AVISIAN Team. They recap a DHS press conference that Zack attended at Chicago O'Hare International Airport regarding the DHS budget and what that means for federal ID programs such as US VISIT, WHTI, REAL ID, and TWIC. Chris and Zack also talk about the new 10 print mandate for US VISIT as well.
Please contact podcasts@avisian.com with any comments or suggestions.
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Faculty unions at Kean University in Union, NJ are fighting a new policy requiring employees to wear identification cards on campus. The University spent an estimated $30,000 on a pilot program to install keyless locks that can only be opened by swiping an authorized ID card. The unions fear the technology will violate faculty members' privacy by recording their "comings and goings" without improving campus security. The unions also argue that the faculty has received no formal training on what to do in a crisis.
Read the full article by Dian Schaffhauser, "Smart ID Cards and Locks Facing Resistance at New Jersey University," here.
Executive Editor Chris Corum discusses a number of easy do-it-yourself NFC applications, the current state of handsets and tags, and the NFC Innovation Award winners with Innovision's Julia Charnock.
Please contact podcasts@avisian.com with any comments or suggestions.
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CBORD's Off-Campus Advantage, which expands the functionality of the university-issued ID card by enabling local merchants to accept it as a form of payment, has added six more colleges to its roster, including State University of New York and University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Higher One, which provides refund management services to higher education institutions, has won Innovator of the Year award from a New Haven, Conn. business journal. "So many times innovation is not so much about invention as it is about applying common sense to problem-solving," Matthew Nemerson, president and CEO of the Connecticut Technology Council, says of Higher One. And, in Higher One's case, innovation emerged from "some smart folks getting together and thinking about a market that needed to be served..." Read the complete story here.
NFC has arrived at Gonzaga University, Spokane, Wash., where vending machines with USA Technologies' ePort are capable of reading an NFC-enabled cell phone. It coincides with an NFC pilot program currently underway in Spokane involving Nokia phones equipped with MasterCard PayPass.
If you're a user of some HP multifunction printers and you're seeking better print management capabilities, Equitrac Corportation may have a deal for you. Its Equitrac Embedded is now designed to work with those printers to provide print authorization, auditing, authentication and other print management solutions.
Executive Editor Chris Corum discusses the present and the future of the TSA's Registered Traveler program with the SVP for Public Policy with Verified Identity Pass. The company is the leader in RT implementations with its CLEAR Card program now in place at 14 airports across the country. Topics include current and pending installations, market projections, business models, and potential ties with FIPS 201, TWIC and other card initiatives.
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In 2005 Iowa legislators passed a law forbidding the use of fingerprint scanners in schools. The biometrics technology was being used in lunch lines, for library checkout and bus boarding. There were fears that the information wasn’t secure and could be hacked.
But the Iowa Department of Education wants lawmakers to pass new legislation making it legal for schools to use the biometrics technology. Schools would be able to save money if they didn’t have to print out different cards for lunch, library and other activities.
Department of Education officials want to educate legislators on what biometric technology is and how it can and can’t be used. "There's been some misconceptions in the industry: What if that fingerprint is stolen from the system?" Ali Pabrai, the chief executive officer of Ecfirst.com, a West Des Moines-based biometrics consulting company. "What's stored is not the actual fingerprint but certain data points."
Read the full story here.
Following a "15 month product and vendor evaluation process," the University of Iowa selected AMAG Technology and SEi services for its campus wide security management solution. The system will be deployed for all existing buildings and others in planning process.
Looking for a one-stop campus card solution, CardSmith has chosen Ingersoll Rand as its preferred access control provider, enabling the campus card provider to offer Schlage locking systems to its college clients. According to CardSmith, campuses can now create any combination of offline, online and/or wireless access control systems.
Students at Juan Diego High School, Draper, Utah, can pay for their lunch by placing a finger on a scanner, and parents can also see what their children are having for the mid-day meal as well. The biometric payment system is from Altoona, Pa.-based FSS Inc.
To begin, parents went online and entered payment information to fund the account. Students were enrolled in the fingerprint system a couple of weeks before the new payments system was rolled out in the cafeteria.
Now when a student is going through the cafeteria line they place a finger on a scanner and their picture pop up on the cashier’s display. The cashier enters what the student is having for lunch and the money is deducted from the account. The school deployed the system to speed up cafeteria lines, according to a letter on the Juan Diego High School Web site. School officials also wanted to enable parents to go online and then see what their child is having for lunch.
Full story is available here.
Listen to Executive Editor Chris Corum and Contributing Editor Ryan Kline talk about the REAL ID final rule that was issued on January 11, 2008.
Please contact podcasts@avisian.com with any comments or suggestions.
Niles P. Dally,
Vice President Sales,
NuVision Networks Corp
So much of what any of us say about what will happen in the future is based on what we know now; however technology, business relationships, and consumer needs are constantly changing. Who would have foreseen this time last year the tragedy at Virginia Tech and the priorities and changes that have been made on campuses as a result.
A series of free seminars covering card-related topics including off-campus merchant rollouts, electronic financial aid delivery, and credit card tuition payment acceptance will take place in cities across the country. The newly announced series titled, "the future of campus payments," is being offered by Heartland Payment Systems, recent buyer of General Meters and provider of cell phone payment solution at Slippery Rock University.
During the next 6 weeks, the free events will be held in Pittsburgh, Dallas, Orlando, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Raleigh, and Denver. To check out the agenda and consider registering for these one-day free events, click here.
Higher One is working with Intuit, maker of financial software page Quicken, to build "unique solutions to help students" with financial education. Beginning in February, students will be able to access Quicken Online to use in tandem with their Higher One accounts.
Registration for the 15th Annual Conference of the National Association of Campus Card Users is open online. The event will be held in Las Vegas at the Riviera, April 6-9. Discounted registrations are available until February 19 so don't wait too long.
Ohio State's catering department is implementing the NetCatering online management and ordering system from CBORD to facilitate operations. OSU already uses Foodservice Suite and other food service software solutions from CBORD. According to a company rep, “NetCatering gives consumers the power to book and edit catered events from the comfort of their own computers, while also reducing catering staff workloads."
Blackboard is acquiring a mass messaging and notification company for $182 million. Privately-held NTI Group, provides these services for educational and government organizations via voice, email, SMS, and other text-receiving devices. The acquisition positions Blackboard to help institutions connect with students in untraditional ways and to address the rising need for alert systems for emergency notifications.
CBORD announced today that they are releasing a new campus lock solution that provides campus housing with an easier, quicker, and more secure option for on campus security. The two types of locks, Campus Lock and Computer-Managed Lock, are both offline card readers that are equipped with CBORD's CS Access Solution. They allow the management of all doors, both online and offline, on a single platform, allowing easier access changes. They are being manufactured by Ingersoll Rand, CBORD's long time partner in access control.
"It's no longer simply about putting a photo on a white piece of plastic," says Ryan Park, Fargo Electronics’ director of product marketing for secure printers/encoders. "It's just not secure. Unfortunately, that represents a lot of the ID vehicles out there today. There are very few applications in the ID card world that don't have a need for security."
Ron Farmer,
Executive Director,
Heartland Payment Systems Micropayments Division
The campus card will truly become a student-centric tool as the places students want to go and the form factors they want to use become the norm. Students conduct transactions on and off campus, and card programs are recognizing this fact. Students also live by their cell phones and they expect more and more services to be available via their handsets.
Taran Lent,
Vice President, Product Development,
CardSmith
I believe this year’s developments will play a major role in determining the future direction and general health of the campus card industry.
It has reached a maturation point of sorts, with most major colleges and universities having now implemented a campus card program in one form or another. That means growth in new programs has slowed substantially. This has spawned a roll-up of the card system vendors in recent years, resulting in a convergence of the feature sets of the major systems in the marketplace.
St. John’s (SJC), located in Washington, DC, is an independent, Catholic, coeducational college preparatory school with 1,100 students and 150 faculty and staff. SJC has deployed Brivo OnSite SE access control system in key locations throughout the 27-acre campus. The Brivo OnSite SE system gives SJC improved access control and access visibility and reporting. The system offers the school on-site data storage control, as opposed to the Web-hosting option the company also offers. eVigilant of Arlington, VA, specified and installed the Brivo system.
Read the full article here.
Colleges have other options for cell phone alerts, of course. They could go off campus and hire a company specializing in text messaging. That's what Rave Wireless and Mobile Campus are offering to universities.
Rave offers what its COO, Raju Rishi, calls "an alert solution, which basically gives the university the ability to get emergency broadcasting to the entire school or a subset of the school (like students who live on campus), whether it's about a gas leak or orientation. The university pays us for that capability yearly. We tie into Blackboard (campus card solution)," he added, "so we don't have to recreate the lists."
Dumont High School, in New Jersey, has instituted smart cards and video surveillance for its students in order to make the school more secure. Smart cards grant access to the school after homeroom bell and allow administrators to control entry beyond normal school hours -- such as opening doors nearest the gym only to basketball players. Expansion of the program is planned in the near future. Security checkpoints were also added to the school. Before printing out a visitor's badge with a photograph, a computer cross-references a national database of sexual predators and checks for court orders restricting a parent's custody of a child.
Read the full article here.
Cindy Vetter,
Director, UNC Card and Student Business Services,
University of Northern Colorado
In the past 15 years, the card industry has seen the relationships between banks and universities come and go. Early on, universities expected the bank to be the cash cow and provide ongoing support for their entire card program. What they seemed to forget is that to give the university something, it has to be earned somewhere else, which was normally by charging the students for the services in some other way, i.e. ATM fees, monthly service charges, low balance fees.
Texas A&M selected CBORD's Foodservice Suite® to power their dining services operation. The institution will also use the company's NetNutrition® online nutritional analysis programand EventMaster® PLUS! catering and event management solution. Texas A&M has 47,000 students, 10,000 in residence halls, and 8200 on board plans.
Zebra Technologies has announced its newest budget printer that will produce a single-sided full color or monochrome card with some high-end features, including ethernet connectivity and smart card encoding. The P100i can print and/or encode cards for a variety of applications at remote and branch locations.
Dean Hatton
President and CEO
Higher One
It has become increasingly clear that competition from the private sector will require institutions of higher education to continue to improve how they compete for students while also increasing operating efficiency. In order to accomplish this, colleges and universities have partnered with companies that can help the school deliver non-academic services. As an increasing number of institutions experience success with these companies, this trend will accelerate.
Recent news about the student loan controversy has led to overall market uncertainty. However, in order to become more competitive, institutions will work to find appropriate and responsible ways for companies to work with higher education institutions and with students. As we enter 2008, the focus of the recent dialogue should move away from a retread of past industry transgressions and move more toward instituting guidelines regarding corporate transparency within higher education.
Lester LaPierre,
Marketing Business Development Manager,
Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies,
Schlage electronic security
Wireless access solutions are now protecting tens of thousands of doorways, from government agencies to university residence halls, and their use will continue to expand.
Open architecture designs means wireless solutions seamlessly integrate with existing access control system and provide limitless choices if installing a new system. Users can now have one access system for both traditional wired openings as well as wireless ones, yielding only one database to manage and one transaction screen to monitor.
Kieran Timmins,
President and CEO,
SmartCentric Technologies International
In 2007, smart card use and acceptance in the U.S. was on the rise. Using contactless smart card technology for payments and physical and logical access became a solution that many campus institutions, both academic and corporate, embraced. With the continued demand and deployment of multi-application smart cards, vendors are finding ways to allow colleges and enterprises to get the increased benefits of smart cards without the costs traditionally associated with them.
Read Winkelman
Vice President, Sales, Colleges & Universities
The CBORD Group, Inc.
As the technology infrastructure continues to evolve and safety concerns change the public space landscape of campuses, colleges will continue to implement systems that deliver service to students on their terms while at the same time protecting the campus community. Expanded adoption of self-service applications and integrated security solutions will be trends in the campus card and auxiliary service areas of campus.
Get a bunch of students, mostly freshmen, away from home for the first time. Stick them all in a dorm, many of them are armed with a checking account and checks, a credit card, a student ID card, their driver license and Social Security card. It's a recipe for ID theft.
Realizing that, many colleges and universities, with the help of their banking partners, have incorporated ID theft prevention techniques into their financial wellness seminars.
CCC Offers Students Choice in how they Receive their Refunds
Higher One, a financial services company focused exclusively on higher education, announced that Central Community College, a public two-year college in Grand Island, Nebraska, has reached an agreement to partner
with the company to issue financial aid refunds to the college’s students.
Not happy with issuing paper checks to the college’s students, CCC decided to look for a more efficient way to issue refunds. Higher One’s OneDisburse Refund Management caught the attention of the administrators at CCC because the service would enable the college to offer a better level of customer service to its students.
Security is now part of the mainstream in day-to-day life at most colleges and universities. Marc Handels, Marketing & Sales Director for SALTO Systems Ltd, examined how security on campus is changing and how access control manufacturers are responding to develop systems to keep pace with their education customers ever more complex requirements. The full article is available at SourceSecurity.com.