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From 4th to 6th November 2008, a number of new contactless, wireless and USB-based technologies will be on exhibit at the 'Cartes & IDentification 2008' event in Paris, France.
During the American Democratic National Convention, which was held in Denver, Colorado, USA, delegates and journalists received a small sticker which they stuck onto their mobile phone or their delegate badge. This 'Go-Tag' (which included a contactless chip) enabled them to pay for beverages, meals and other services at the event.
"Tomorrow the chip will be inside the phone," declared the manager of the company which supplied the tags. Of course these chips could just as easily be implanted in wrist-watches, bracelets, USB flash drives, or key rings. For example, an Austrian watchmaker has launched a watch into which a SIM card module can be inserted, including a PayPass contactless payment application.
Swatch has also created watches containing a contactless chip. MasterCard had already produced a bracelet distributed to about 5,000 US football fans to pay for their entrance fee to the Giants Stadium in New York.
These examples show the extent to which contactless technologies have enabled applications such as payment, ticketing and access control. But while the function remains, the form factor is clearly changing. Thanks to contactless chips, a family of communicating and secured objects has appeared which maintains a lineage with the traditional smartcard. This is the case for payments, with the appearance of mini-cards, key rings, bracelets and watches. And it is also the case with the development of biometric passports which include a chip in their cover page or in a special page.
The future may also lie in "connectics", mobile phones and machine-to-machine technologies. Connectics and the USB protocol have also generated a family of secured tokens for which Eurosmart has estimated a market of some 90 million units by 2012. Mobile telephony has also contributed to this revolution since it was the first to impose new form factors (i.e. plug-in and 3FF) other than traditional SIM cards. But this change is far from being complete since the current development of machine-to-machine (M2M) applications is generating new work to define form factors different from those of the traditional SIM card. In fact, the latter can already be directly incorporated in the communication circuits of a mobile phone in the form of a bare chip. According to ABI Research, this could represent a market of some 80 million cellular modules by 2013.
Source: Cartes & IDentification 2008
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