Look Around: Smart Cards Integrated with Biometrics to Provide Cost-effective and Secure Solutions Across All Applications

National ID Cards are becoming all the rage in many parts of the world. Newswire Today! reports:

Industry participants in every part of the value chain are implementing smart cards integrated with biometrics on an open platform to ensure interoperability and ease of addition of future applications. Such long-term planning will ensure the survival of any integrated solution's implementation.

As such, there is immense opportunity for smart cards in the untapped markets in Asia. The widespread acceptance of new technology in the early stages is quite encouraging for smart card participants. System integrators have realized the need for proper planning and coordination in order to increase market revenue.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (smartcards.frost.com), APAC Integrated Smart Cards and Biometrics Markets, finds that the market earned $249.1 million in 2007 and is expected to reach $822.2 million by 2013.

The market has already bagged numerous and significant projects such as the national ID and e-passport programs. National ID projects are the most active revenue generators for the market, since all governments in the Asia Pacific are looking at implementing biometrics along with smart cards.

A few national ID projects such as those of India's and Malaysia's have already started using biometric verification, while Japan's and China's are still at the planning stages. With many more countries looking at implementing national ID projects, and biometrics being one of the pre requisites for these projects, the market has good reasons to feel optimistic.

"The number of national ID projects that are in the pipeline in the Asia Pacific shows the huge potential for smart cards integrated with biometrics," says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Navin Rajendra. "Furthermore, with the implementation of the e-passport program coming to an end by 2008, new issuance of passports by the countries under the U.S. VISA Waiver program will add significantly to the unit shipment growth."

What kind of governments make up most of Asia?

The United States of America has been different from the rest of the world in its clear concepts of freedom, federalism, and many other important concepts in the Constitution.

However, the politicians and population of the U.S.A. are increasingly willing to abandon those principles because of the immense power of newly applied technology.

I've always maintained that technology is usually amoral. The problems arise in how we use technology. A database society is going to challenge many of the principles that have secured American freedom for so many years.

The REAL ID Act creates, not just a "secure card," but a transformation of a license to drive our highways into a unified database network, ubiquitous scanners, and the ability to track Amercans in real-time.

When the State aligns every aspect of citizens' lives into one collective pulled by the will of the powerful--we don't have a free country anymore. We have to call it something else.

Look around.

Think again.

Read America's founding documents.