August MoMo London
The theme for last night’s MoMo London was Mobile Digital Identity. Here’s a quick summary…
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Companies such as Sun already have some technologies, currently used in enterprise systems, that could be applied to more wide ranging mobile communities. Issues include scalability, interoperability with legacy systems and logging.
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Dave Birch from Consult Hyperion explained… when new identity systems are tied to older systems security tends to get compromised… there’s often a paradox of one party wanting to know about the other without revealing information about themselves… we don’t often need to know WHO people are, just their capabilities or WHAT they are… and how NFC might solve some of the problems … brand rather than technical capability may drive NFC phone adoption.
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Janko Mrsic-Flogel explained how Transport for London are conducting trials that use NFC (and GPS and CellId where available) to provide interactive route guidance.
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Ben Whitaker from Masabi demonstrated their Java ME based two factor authentication system.
The panel and subsequent questions highlighted the following issues…
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Possible fragmentation of solutions.
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The threat from fraud and hacking.
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Privacy and permission.
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The intrinsic value of aggregated data and it’s possible use and misuse.
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Lack of standards for taxonomies and sharing data.
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What will drive adoption (of NFC)? Branding or functionality?
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Lack of support for NFC in current phones. It was said to be 2009/10 before widely available from phone OEMs but this was contested by some people who thought this would be dictated more by network operators.
I have personally worked on two identity (NFC) related projects. Here are my thoughts…
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NFC and its support within phones is a small part of the problem and is probably a distraction from more pressing problems. Many of the applications described at MoMo (ie opening doors, sending data by touch, paying) could already be done using bluetooth and some clever software - but they aren’t. Why? The answers reveal what problems have to be solved.
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I think there are three types of NFC phone - sticking tags on any (existing) phone, SIM (Toolkit) based and Java/C++ API based. Only the latter can provide rich applications that interact with phone data (eg contacts, files and graphical UI) and provide the kind of applications people are dreaming about. I can’t see most phones having this and an API that can be used across most phones by 2010… or at all at the moment. Any near-term mass market solutions will just involve sticking a tag onto a phone - and it could actually be stuck on anything… or just be a card.
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The largest problem is the current network operator ownership of (location, historical, contextual and billing) data. Apart from the political problems of releasing data, the technical systems required to support this (and continual queries to the systems) are a problem in themself. I really can’t see this happening in the short term. Hence, in the next few years, identity (and NFC) is mostly an opportunity for the big players who are (or can influence) network operators and can also influence end-users (financially or otherwise) to take up these kinds of services.
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