Card Technology articles from April 2006

Card Technology archives from April 2006

SIMs And The China Syndrome.
April 1, 2006... There's good news and bad news from China these days for smart card vendors. The good news is the world's largest buyer of SIM cards, China Mobile, has been ordering lots of cards again. Its more than 30 provincial and district operators...

Vendors Stay Profitable Despite Falling Prices.
April 1, 2006... The three major publicly traded smart card vendors all turned a profit for the second year in a row in 2005, despite an accelerating fall in card prices. The earnings reports showed the vendors, Gemplus International, Axalto and Oberthur...

Newswatch: Europe.(electronic passports to gain importance in near future)
April 1, 2006... UK ISSUES ITS FIRST E-PASSPORTS The United Kingdom issued its first electronic passports last month, the UK Home Office says. The UK Passport Service expects to issue about 7 million passports this year, the Home Office has told Card...

Canada Speeds Move To Chip.(future prospects of smart cards usage)
April 1, 2006... Canada's three major card associations said in March they are working together to accelerate the migration of the country's credit and debit cards to smart cards. By 2010, Visa expects 85% of its Canadian transactions to be made with smart...

Newswatch: Americas.(Gemplus International S.A. and Axalto merges)
April 1, 2006... GEMALTO MOVES A STEP CLOSER U.S. antitrust regulators have given their tacit approval to the proposed merger between the world's two largest smart card suppliers, Gemplus International and Axalto, the two France-based companies announced...

Calendar.(Calendar)
April 1, 2006... MAY 2-4: CARDTECH/SECURTECH 2006 - SAN FRANCISCO Organized by SourceMedia Conferences & Exhibitions For more information, contact Bill Rutledge at: 800 442 2878 (US); +1 212 803 8777 bill.rutledgesourcemedia.com www.ctst.com...

Newswatch: Asia.
April 1, 2006... CHINESE EXAMINERS USE SMART CARDS TO THWART FAKE TEST TAKERS Officials who administer a graduate school admissions exam are using China's national ID smart cards and contactless terminals to identify test takers. Prospective students who...

People On The Move.(Alain Jarre appointed as marketing director at Oberthur Card Systems)(Kathleen Carroll appointed as director at HID Corp.)(Christophe Duverne appointed as vice president and general manager at Identification Business Line )(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Jason Hart has been named CEO of U.S.-based network security firm ActivIdentity. Hart, who joined ActivIdentity in 2005, replaces Ben C. Barnes. Alain Jarre is the new mobile and solutions marketing director at France-based Oberthur Card...

MasterCard Europe: Different, But Not Better: As MasterCard restructures into a public company, only in Europe are bankers guaranteed local control. Will this turn out to be a mistake?
April 1, 2006... With its IPO, MasterCard will convert from a registered private share corporation controlled by banks into an independent public company-almost. The cutover will be clean except in Europe, its second-largest market. In Europe, a board of...

The World's Biggest SIM Market Prepares For 3G To 3G.
April 1, 2006... It's long been a guessing game of just when the Chinese government will issue licenses for its third-generation mobile networks. Observers have been wrong in the past, believing Beijing would end the delays in clearing the way for mobile...

Can EMV Help Banks Capture Low-Value Payments?
April 1, 2006... A rush-hour march through a crowded train station or leisurely afternoon in a sidewalk cafe-both offer an opportunity for payment card issuers, say card organizations and vendors. Today, an overwhelming percentage of consumers in both...

ECB Weighs In.(European Central Bank)(Single European Payment Area)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... The European Central Bank is calling on the banking industry to beef up standards for how card payment transactions will be handled when the single euro payments area takes effect in 2008. The ECB, in its recent progress report on the...

StepNexus Set To Cast .NET For New Business.
April 1, 2006... For nearly 10 years, the London-based Maosco Ltd. and the Multos Consortium pushed the Multos operating system to banks, government agencies and, from time-to-time, mobile network operators. The result has been just 50 million cards issued...

Electronic Passports: Is a Global Certification Body Necessary?
April 1, 2006... Governments around the world plan to issue millions of electronic passports this year as they race to meet deadlines set by the European Union and the United States. They expect the travel documents to work at border checkpoints worldwide,...

Are Operators Ready To Make The Leap To Mega-Memory?
April 1, 2006... QUICK READ Vendors are pushing SIM cards with thousands of times the memory of conventional cards. But it won't be easy to convince mobile network operators and other smart card issuers to buy into the concept. Smart card vendors...

Waiting For The Music To Arrive.(Orange France's new smart card)
April 1, 2006... For all the talk by vendors of the dawning era of mega-memory SIM cards, there is still only one such card that subscribers can actually use. Orange France launched its "SIM+" last November in a commercial trial involving some several...

Some Big Chips.
April 1, 2006... Hopes for a mega-memory SIM market has attracted two new semiconductor suppliers to the smart card industry, along with a couple of established players. Vendors say they can supply flash-based SIMs in increments of 64 megabytes to up to 512MB...

Standards Battle Continues To Slow High-Speed SIM.
April 1, 2006... No matter how many hundreds of megabytes vendors try to pack into their proposed SIM cards, unless it has a way to receive data quickly from handsets, all that extra memory would be of little use to mobile network operators and subscribers....

Advertising Index.
April 1, 2006... ACT Canada 41 Web Site: www.actcda.com Advanced Card System 24 Tel: +852 2796 7873 Web Site: www.acs.com.hk E-mail: infoacs.com.hk Banksys ...

Contact Our Advertising Sales Representatives.
April 1, 2006... United States and Canada Jim Baker phone 312 983 6179 fax 312 913 1334 Europe & Asia Bernard Pingree Jean-Charles Abeille phone + 33 (01) 46 43 00 66 fax + 33 (01) 46 43 01 34 bernard.pingreeinfopac.fr icabeilleinfopac.fr...

Asian Giants Swallow Up SIMs: China vs India: A Tale of two huge SIM markets.(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... The two population giants will have nearly 1 billion mobile subscriptions between them in 2010 - almost all of them requiring a subscriber identity module card. Mobile operators in China already buy more than 300 million SIM cards per year,...