News

Smart Insights is a weekly newsletter covering the smart card industry, its businesses, its technologies, and of course, its markets as well as its technology suppliers. Smart Insights covers all the major trends in the industry, it encompasses worldwide business, public and private standardization bodies, industry analysts and also the people belonging to the Smart Card Industry community. Smart Insights is brought to you by Thierry Spanjaard who has more than 15 years experience in the industry, in a variety of positions.

Smart Insights: facts . intelligence . now

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Shortly after the offer made by Safran (cf. Smart Insights #08-26), Digimarc Board decided to accept L-1 Identity offer to acquire the company in an all-cash transaction.

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After the first announcements by Karsten Nohl (cf. Smart Insights #08-11 and 17), security researchers at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Holland, have been playing with Philips's Mifare RFID cards for some time, and last week managed to crack the encryption on a card and clone it.

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PACA Mobile Center (PMC), a test platform for mobile applications, BabySmart, an association of companies involved in portable secure objects, the Secured Communication Solutions cluster (Pole Transactions Communicantes Securisees – Pole SCS), and SFR, a major French mobile network operator announce the launch of the largest NFC mutualized competence center in Europe.

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Digimarc Corporation announced receipt of an unsolicited non-binding indication of interest from Safran, in which Safran proposed to acquire the outstanding common stock of Digimarc, following the spin-off of Digimarc’s digital watermarking business and cash on hand, for US$ 300 million (EUR 193 million) in cash.

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According to data released by The Nielsen Company, already, 9 million US mobile subscribers say they have used their mobile phone to pay for goods or services, and half of all data users (49%) say they expect to participate in mobile commerce in the future.

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According to a study released by Unisys, 71% of all consumers surveyed in 14 countries will not consider using a mobile device to bank or shop online.

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Some Ghanaian banks, HFC Bank, Ecobank Ghana Limited and Barclays Bank, have already begun issuing biometric e-Zwich smartcards to customers, indicating their readiness to kick-start the program (cf. Smart Insights #08-19 and 21). The banks also started distributing point of sales (POS) devices to merchants.

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After the announcement last week that handset sales had been decreasing in the US in Q1/2008 (cf. Smart Insights #08-22), Gartner announced that sales of mobile phones in Western Europe decreased 16.4% year on year to 35.9 million in Q1/2008.

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During EUSEcWest conference, Collin Mulliner, a security expert gave a presentation covering several attacks and vulnerabilities of NFC phones.

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First Data has signed an agreement with Eufiserv and its fifteen shareholders, which includes twelve European banks and banking organizations, with the intention of expanding and developing the European inter-bank processing network.

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