Smart Cards: Seizing Strategic Business Opportunities

by Catherine Allen and Smart Card Forum

Presents the potential impact of the smart card and provides insights on implementing technologies and innovations. This book helps develop plans, implement solutions and navigate through the myriad... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786311088
• ISBN13: 9780786311088
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 311 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Smart Cards - The Technology of the Future (still)

This book has everything that you may need to know about smart cards. It contains a series of well-written in-depth articles by the experts in the field. Smart cards are the technology of the future -- and they may remain that way. The previous review predicts a smart card revolution for the year 2000. Here it is. Y2K has come and gone. Where are my smart cards? The reality is that the most pervasive use of smart cards has come about by government directive. The King of France has decreed that you cannot use a phone without having a smart card. Much touted experiments for smart card use in the United States have been failures. These include smart card electronic purses for the Atlanta Olympics and for Manhattan. It may just be that smart cards are not a compelling technology.

How Smart are Smart Cards?

Smart cards are poised to invade two billion wallets and purses by the year 2000. If you have a credit card, chances are it will have a spider-like chip holding all your essential data. Even your mobile phone uses a smart card. But there are more applications to come, and with it diverse business opportunities for the organisation or individual who is always looking ahead. Smart Cards, edited by Catherine Allen and William Barr with Ron Shultz, breaks the mindset of looking at smart cards merely as an electronic purse. It expounds on the many possibilities that this wafer-thin chip-in-a-card can do to revolutionise the finance and retail sector. In short, it talks about smart-card technology. But don't just take it from me or any of the authors--arrive at your opinion from the cast of major players in the smart-card industry that the authors have assembled. Besides streamlining commercial transactions, the smart card will also have a hand in decentralising the storage of personal information. Hospitals will be able to access a patient's medical history just by reading the individual's smart card, thereby saving precious time in an emergency. At the airport, the smart card will make queues at the check-in counter disappear as travellers can check in electronically with their cards. Besides focusing on the application benefits of smart cards, this book also addresses the stumbling blocks of electronic commerce, namely privacy and security issues. A whole section of the book is catered not only to the issues of privacy but also the existing technologies to counter this problem. Innovative business individuals interested in leap-frogging ahead will benefit most from this book as it forces you to re-think standard business models in electronic commerce. Smart Cards also provides fertile ground for new smart-card applications because it showcases many ongoing trials and pilot projects. My only disappointment with the book is that its research is mainly based on corporations in the United States, a country whose advanced telecommunications infrastructure is actually a disincentive to the adoption of smart-card technology. Europe and some part of Asia, on the other hand, have been more than enthusiastic in their use of smart-card technology, and should be able to offer more real-world insights into the nature of the beast. On the whole, Smart Cards provides a good reading of the pulse of the industry and gets you up to speed with the business opportunities of "intelligent cards" that may soon slim that inch-thick wallet of yours--maybe in more ways than one!