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Thought leadership from Consult Hyperion

Archives for November 2007

Bi-fi

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[Dave Birch] I love it when his happens. A couple of years ago I helped to write a report for a government department here in the U.K. The report covered a roadmap for certain “connection and disconnection” technologies. On one part of the roadmap I had to illustrate a point with a couple of “horizon” communication technologies that I thought might be relevant in a 5-10 year timescale. One of the ones I chose was digital connection via biological carrier (ie, sending signals through your body). I labeled it “bifi”, although I can’t remember where I got the tag from. 5-10 years? Well, NTT DoCoMo unveiled a prototype bifi phone last month. The phone, which uses a sensor made by start-up Kaiser Technology Co., sends electric signals through the human body to transmit data, enabling data transfer at the touch of a finger. One of the examples used in the press release is that doors to secure areas would open as your phone transmits your ID through your feet, but I think it offers more.

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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.

Greens back

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[Dave Birch] Payments, just like every other business, are acquiring a green tinge as the marketing folk get to grips with the low carbon economy. There have been some efforts before — some of you may remember that “Visa Swap” earlier in the year — and I’m sure there will be more of these (rather limited) initiatives to come. It’s not transparently obvious to me that this sort of thing makes much of a difference to consumer behaviour but I’m sure every little helps. Consumer research from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that more than half of respondents would be likely to replace their existing credit card with a ‘green’ credit card if it helped them tackle their carbon footprint and two in five said they would give up an existing loyalty programme or cash reward card in favour of a green alternative. I know consumers’ revealed preferences may be at variance with their environmental aspirations but you can see the trend building. Surely, a truly green credit card would be one that allowed you to buy organic tomatoes but not a flight to Spain. We haven’t got that far yet, but Barclays has launched a carbon-offset corporate card. Barclaycard Business manages the process on behalf of corporate customers by providing them with commission-free access to the Certified Emission Reduction Market via Barclays Capital’s Emissions Trading Desk. So Barclaycard tell you how much your employees have been spending on air travel and then you can buy carbon offsets to match them and assuage your environmental guilt at allowing them to fly so much.

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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.

Chinese whispers

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[Dave Birch] Lying on your Facebook page is part of the fun, isn’t it? Just like being a man in Second Life if you’re a woman. Surely being able to play around with multiple identities is one of the fascinating new aspects of life online? Apparently, not everyone shares such a playful and experimental view of virtual identity. One of China’s major game operators has announced that they will freeze the accounts of male players who have elected to play as female characters in the King of the World MMORPG. Apparently there are no bans on women playing male characters, but women (and men-wanting-to-play-as-women) will be required to prove their gender via webcam. I did not make this up. Women will be required to prove their gender via webcam (how, exactly? — the mind literally boggles). And this is in a country with compulsory ID cards. Next they’ll be saying that you can only be a Gnome Bard if you are in real life less than four feet tall and able to recite a medieval Icelandic saga from memory. Who is running these games, David Blunkett? (Note to foreign readers, David Blunkett was the British Home Secretary who introduced the current British identity card scheme).

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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.

In a goldmine, the medium of exchange is the pickaxe

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[Dave Birch] The title of this post comes from a book that I’m reading at the moment. No, not a scholarly treatise on the nature of money or the history of transactional commerce, but “Making Money”, the latest of the Terry Pratchett Discworld novels. I can’t say I’m a particular fan of Pratchett, but it is easy to read and it potters along at sufficient pace to make it a tolerable diversion. I read a couple of the Discworld books many years ago and found them mildly amusing in places but not compelling. I realise I’m risking opprobrium by advertising my indifference, since Terry’s fans are legion and dedicated, but there you go: it should not put you off reading the book. I was the only person in Britain who didn’t like the Harry Potter books either, but who am I against so many? No. 1 son, on the other hand, rather likes the Discworld series so it seemed only fair to allow him to present an alternative opinion, to whit:

I think that the discworld novels are very good because they are well written with a lot of imagination and are very funny. One of my favorite parts of ‘the light fantastic’ is when he describes the great a’tuin ( the giant turtle on which discworld rests ) as very intelligent, and as the humans found it easy to read it’s mind, they also took ages to get information, because, although smart, with neurons the size of roads, thought would generally be quite slow. This was one of the funniest parts of the book, in my opinion. One of the parts with the most imagination was when Pratchett described one witch, because he noted that she had two bodies- she was not two people, just one person with an extra body. I thought that this was extremely clever.

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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.

The Zimmerman CDs

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[Dave Birch] The fallout from the great data escape of 2007 continues, some of it good (such as the Information Commissioner’s Office calling for “privacy-enhancing technologies” to be built into future projects) and some it ludicrous. Some outlandish opinions are gaining currency. Noted conman Frank Abignail says that he is sure that the CDs were stolen by organised criminals rather than being lost by disorganised civil servants:

I truly believe that someone paid for information to be stolen.

He must be wrong. Why would criminals steal the CDs (which someone might eventually notice were missing) rather than steal the data? Frank is confusing the Hollywood MacGuffin-led version of data theft — in which the master criminal / CIA / international terrorist gang chases the hero around the world to destroy a disk containing top secret evidence of a conspiracy, apparently unware that you can e-mail the data from one place to another rather than transporting it as atoms (as were Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, it seems) — with real-world risk analysis. In Frank’s film version, the plot might be that the criminals disguised themselves as couriers, bluffed their way past the front desk, took the packages, found the one with the CDs in, stole it, changed clothes to pretend to be HMRC clerks and then gave the rest of the packages to the real courier. In my film version, some wally has put the package in the wrong bin and it’s gone into landfill. But just suppose…

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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.

Future imperfect

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[Dave Birch] I went to Dublin for a client of ours to give a talk about the future of payments. One of my favourite sites for helping me to think about such things is Paleo Future. It’s a super blog all about past views of the future, if you see what I mean. Not only is it fun, but it contains some tremendously relevant information that ought to help us (by which I mean people trying to understand the relationship between technology and business) improve and refine our own views of the future A great example was the recent posting about a New York Times Magazine advertisement from 24th May 1964 about the “credit card ring”. It’s actually an advertisement for Sheaffer Pens, but it features a ring that projects and American Express card. The gist of the advertisement is that your credit card of the future may not actually be a physical card any more, but you will still need to sign for it. It’s fascinating to reflect on how wrong this is: my credit card still looks like a credit card, but I haven’t signed for it in a couple of years (except in, if I remember correctly, Tunisia and the USA: no, wait, the hotel in Tunisia had an EMV terminal).

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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.

Live from London

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[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.

The great data disaster of 2007

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[Dave Birch] Half way through the Digital Identity Forum yesterday, the session chair announced (hot from his Blackberry) that the British government — specifically, the Child Benefit Agency — has lost the personal details of every parent in the country and as a result someone has resigned. I haven’t had the energy to try and figure out why on Earth in 2007 government departments would be posting CDs to each other rather than using PGP or S/MIME on the interweb, but there you go. Anyway, by this morning there was an identity theft media frenzy never before witnessed in our green and pleasant land. I woke up to breakfast TV in the hotel and every channel was leading with the story. I’ve just seen the Chancellor of the Exchequer being interviewed on Sky and I actually felt sorry for him: some of the questions were ridiculous (eg, won’t the fraudsters wait a few years before they obtain credit cards in our children’s names). For a more measured response, see here: Forum friend Ian Brown was whisked away from the Digital Identity Pub Quiz to appear on BBC’s Newsnight.

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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.

The Tr* scheme

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[Dave Birch] Apart from having one of the best URLs on the interweb, xmlgrrl Eve Maler also has a splendidly useful PDF containing a set of diagrams that give an overview of the relationship between SAML, Liberty, Cardspace and so on. Well worth downloading.

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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.

Sectioned

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[Dave Birch] One of the reasons why I always — and I mean always — use one of my credit cards both online and offline (and remain mystified about the growth in debit card usage) is because of the Consumer Credit Act (1974). In particular, it’s because of Section 75 of that Act. For those of you unfamiliar with the details of our credit regulations, “s.75” is the part of the Act that says to me as a consumer that (in essence) if shit happens, it’s bank’s problem and not mine. So if I buy a holiday from a travel agent who subsequently goes bust, I get my money back. If I buy a dishwasher from a web site and the dishwasher doesn’t show up, I get my money back. This isn’t a universal right (it’s limited to transactions between 100 and 30,000 Sterling) , but it covers most of the important transactions I ever make. Naturally, banks have been complaining about it, as I would if I was a bank since s.75 has an element of moral hazard about it: as a consumer, there’s no need for me to take any care in checking out the web merchant I’m dealing with because I’m not liable.

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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.

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