[Dave Birch] Season’s greetings and all the best for 2008. I hope you enjoy a break as much as I do, so in the European fashion I’m off for a few days and I look forward to catching up with you all again in the New Year.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] Season’s greetings to one and all and best wishes for 2008. We end a fantastic 2007 as the 60th most influential business blog in the world and in American Banker’s blogwatch. Thanks to everyone for their comments, suggestions and constructive criticism. Have a great break and I’ll see you all in the New Year — don’t forget to pencil in 23rd/24th April in London for the 11th annual Digital Money Forum sponsored by Visa Europe and Webmoney.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] Mike Hendry is an independent consultant in payment systems and e-commerce. He works with banks, retailers and service providers throughout Europe on technology and business strategy issues and played an important role in the project office for the U.K.’s transition to chip & PIN. I’ve known Mike for a very long time and I’ve always found his opinions and intuitions to be on the money: I always pay attention to what he says and you should to. In this podcast, Mike chats about multi-application smart cards, the subject of his book “Multi-application Smart Cards: Technology and Applications” (so prominently featured on the Digital Money Blog!).

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Steve Taylor] The blovel “68” takes the form of a series of ‘first hand reports’, people from the future talking in their own voices about their work, their lives and their relationship with communications. We begin with Episode 1, Mudge’s Story.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] Just to let you all know that the 11th annual Digital Money Forum will be held in London on 23rd/24th April 2008. It will be back at a hotel in central London, after last year’s excursion to the Tower of London, and will feature the traditional mix of presentations and expert panels. And the first ever Digital Money Mastermind competition with a St. George’s day theme. Would potential sponsors — previous sponsors have first refusal, of course — please form an orderly queue. E-mail me for more details. Our good friends at ACI Worldwide have already agreed to support the Digital Money MasterMind competition so we just need a couple more sponsors and we’re all systems go.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] A big thank you to everyone who took part in this year’s Digital Identity Forum. The feedback I’ve already had has been absolutely excellent and I really appreciate the efforts of everyone who made it happen. I’d also like to thank our sponsors for their unconditional support: CPP and CoreStreet for suppporting the event and ACI Worldwide for supporting the pub quiz and tour. And on behalf of the charities that we support with the surplus from the event, thanks to everyone who came along. I like to think that the Forum stands out as being a place for real discussion and debate rather than a standard death-by-Powerpoint commercial event and, once again, the delegates didn’t let us down. Thanks to everyone.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] The blook that we put together for the Digital Money Forum turned out to be rather popular. As one of our consulting clients put it, we’d accidentally invented the perfect business product for the tube! So we’ve done the same for the Digital Identity Forum. Jane Adams and I have taken the “best” (in an utterly subjective contest) posts on the Digital Identity Forum blog over the last year or so, organised and edited them, indexed them and turned them into a blook: a book made from a blog. The blook is the “The Digital Identity Reader 2007″ and all delegates to the eighth annual Digital Identity Forum in London on November 20th and 21st — sponsored by the kind, wise, good people at CPP, CoreStreet and ACI Worldwide — will receive a complimentary copy. Less fortunate persons can still order it from Amazon.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] If you fancy listening to some single sign-on vendors presenting product features and calling them a strategic vision for the future of identity management then you have plenty of conferences to choose from. If, on the other hand, you fancy joining in intelligent conversation and genuine debate about the future of identity in a networked world, you’ll probably want to come along to our annual Digital Identity Forum in three weeks’ time. There are presentations and expert panels featuring representatives from the Home Office, UCL, Identity & Passport Services, Visa, Oxford Internet Institute, ACI Worldwide, University of Surrey, Garlik, CoreStreet, EMAP, Hitachi Europe, Valimo, DEMOS, Ping Identity, Sun, Bournemouth University, ARM, CPP, the Mobile Data Association and the National Policing Improvement Agency. They’ll be covering subjects ranging from the use of digital signatures in Turkish mobile phones to the potential for authentication as a business in its own right. But most of all they’ll be continuing the Digital Identity Forum’s tradition of open, friendly and informed discussion. And there’s a pub quiz too! What’s not to like! And they’re virtually giving away the delegate places for the miniscule sum of 445 pounds plus VAT.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] The microfinance story continues with the new that eBay has launched MicroPlace, a website that enables US customers to invest in microfinance projects. The site acts as a broker, allowing customers to buy microfinance investments for a minimum of $100 from microfinance security issuers. How fun. Investors can choose the country and microfinance institution that their money goes to. At launch the site will allow people to direct investments to Africa, Eurasia, Latin America and Southeast Asia. As soon as the scheme is extended to the U.K., we will make a Digital Money blog investment in Africa on behalf of all of our readers. I know just how worthwhile microfinance is because of Consult Hyperion’s work for Vodafone in Kenya. Kenya continues to provide a fascinating case study on the evolving competition and cooperation between banks and mobile operators in the world of payments. Safaricom’s m-payment scheme M-PESA has been signing up 2,500 customers per day. Just to put this in context, Barclaycard in Kenya issued 7,000 cards last year. Kenya has about 70,000 credit card users, up from 10,000 in the eighties, and nine million mobile phone subscribers. As an aside, there is an obvious corollary to this kind of development: whereas phishers in the U.K. target banks, in Africa they have started targeting mobile. Bad guys have conducted fraudulent transactions on ABSA accounts by swapping the customers’ SIM cards. It was actually quite a complicated fraud, defeating a security measure implemented by ABSA where a one-time password is sent to a customer’s mobile phone. By swapping SIM cards (an accomplice inside the phone company moves the mobile number to the new SIM), the fraudsters could intercept that password and move money. Repeat after me: one factor bad, two factor better…

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.