Beyond cell phone wallets: biometrics promise truly wallet-free future
August 4, 2011
PalmSecure (credit: Fujitsu)
Near field communication (NFC) has allowed users in Asia and especially Japan to replace credit cards with phones — yet the technology has languished in the U.S., in spite of Google’s best efforts to provide a “digital wallet” that allows users to pay for things simply by touching their phone to a pad.
PalmSecure, a superior competing technology from Fujitsu has now emerged. It’s a contactless biometric system that does not require the user to have their own hardware. Near-infrared light shines up from a detector, allowing it to image the unique pattern of veins in a person’s hand. This pattern is stored as a unique identifier, not an image.
Comments (2)
by Digitālais bizness » Fujitsu piedāvā rokas vēnu autentifikācijas iekārtas biomētriskai autentifikācijai.
[...] KurzweilAI.net un [...]
by asiwel
I wonder how one would hand one’s hand to be scanned through the fast food pickup window. So many transactions involve handing a card to somebody to scan. In fact, it is beginning to seem obnoxious to me to be told by the clerk standing in front of me that I “must” scan my own card and push all the buttons to complete the transaction. Today I stood in line behind a lady paying for a Starbucks coffee with a picture of her Starbucks card (bar code) on her cell phone. The cash register scanner scanned the phone image. I thought that odd because I expected the phone to communicate directly with the register. Evidently not yet …. (Ha, I sort of felt like Scotty must have felt when trying to talk to the 20th century laptop in the Star Trek movie.)