by Andy Williams, Contributing Editor, AVISIAN Publications

The Smart Card Alliance has seen some good days and some really bad ones. Following 9-11 and the mini-recession that terrorist attack caused, the Alliance’s lost nearly one-half its membership – falling from 160 to 86 organizations. Now, it has made its way back to nearly pre 9-11 membership numbers and, if 2005 is any indication, even better days are ahead for the alliance. 

Sure, students are a bank’s reason for its campus existence, but a more profitable client base includes the ones teaching the students … as well as the university administrators and staff. But attracting professors and staff that already have a banking relationship is no easy task. 

Electronic lock provider Onity and Residential Management Systems have created a new interface for the 80 colleges using their services which slashes in half the check-in time for students first arriving on campus. Before the streamlined interface was implemented, students went through a two-step process before they could receive their encoded key cards for residence hall and building access. 

A twenty-year veteran in the technology industry has joined campus card supplier The CBORD Group as its senior vice president of sales and marketing. Prior to joining CBORD, Randy Eckels had worked with Knowledge Planet, Sprint, and AT&T. 

Electronic payment technology provider MagTek, addressing the need for contactless support, has released its newest hybrid mag stripe/contactless/smart card reader designed for kiosks, vending machines and fuel pumps. 

Labcal Technologies will be incorporating UPEK’s TouchChip Fingerprint Sensor (on display at CTST) into its Be.U Mobile handheld reader, developed for use in employee ID verification, e-passports, and law enforcement. The reader can be used with existing AFIS systems and performs 1:1 matching with an ID document, contact or contactless and 1:N matching by storing the fingerprint templates and the credentials in the reader or on a server. 

Card Tech-Secure Tech may be the largest “identity” event in the Bay Area this week, but the Internet Identity Workshop may have more long term impact.

Using an open-space format the attendees are driving the content of each session and with the attendees reading like a who’s who of digital identity the quality is high. Organized by Phil Windley, Doc Searls, and Kaliya Hamlin, IIW is covering a wide range of theoretical, technical and practical aspects of digital identity.

Will it change the way you issue cards? Probably not, but the protocols and models being developed will have a tremendous impact on how those credentials are used over the next several years. The theoretical discussions about identity address areas largely skipped over in physical identity implementations. With growing concerns around privacy, especially in the credential and RFID arenas, these discussions are critical for vendors and end users, alike.

If you’re really interested in the development of identity infrastructure check out the wiki. Over the course of May 1-3, different attendess will be contributing notes and it will probably continue to be a source for the digital identity discusssions. If you’re really technical, look at the ##identity IRC channel on Freenode for Digital Identity discussions and backchannel.

If you happen to be in the Bay Area and this looks interesting, consider heading down to the Computer Museum in Mountain View, CA for Wednesday.