#Biometrics2015 in decline

My fist visit to the London Biometrics Show was back in October 2003. It was 2 years after 9/11 and the security world was set on fire. Gartner, Forrester and all the other researchers promised a biometric world with astronomical growth figures. 
​No one could foresee the hard reality of a very long lead-time for biometrics. It was about to lift off ten years later when Apple launched "the biometric killer app", a fingerprint reader in the startbutton of a phone. Simple & elegant and flawlessly working.
During that decade many biometric pioneers didn't survive. 
SAFlink started in 1988 (which company burned roughly $350MLN) eventually went bankrupt in 2009 due to mismanagement, lack of focus and vision. 

​BMF introduced in 2003 a biometric sensor based on TFT-material. It was a so-called pressure sensitive sensor. Through various layers of material an image of the fingerprint was created solely by a simple pressure of the finger on the reader. Big benefit: you could read the fingerprint under almost every circumstances even "under" water (see picture). It was sold in Europe via Hitachi. I was really impressed.
Little did I know know at that time that the layers in the readers only survived roughly 1000x presses. So when I introduced a IP-based variant of the reader for securing a datacenter I ran into trouble a few months after the go-live. Shit happens. But Hitachi promised me the world and came up with the prototype of the finger vein scanner in the summer 2005. It was the death for BMF. The company never had real lift-off.
Nor did Hitachi by the way. Still their finger vein solution needs to lift-off. They are pushing hard on ATM's in banking, but Fingerprint looks to be the winner in this sector. 
Hitachi's business model sucks. It lacks interoperability with the other vein vendors. There is simply no standard for finger vein, which makes it hard for enterprises to invest in. They will never be sure of their investment. It used to be the same for Fingerprint, but those technology vendors (with a little help from the Government) solved the interoperability problem and then it took off.

#Biometrics2015
In my last post I told you my wish-list. I was really looking forward to this year's edition of the Biometrics show. But I was very disappointed.
​#BiometricsXXXX is organized by Reed/Elsevier. When I was exhibiting in London in 2013, I already noticed that the format was in decline. Somehow Reed/Elsevier was not able to attract the new young and hip biometric technology startups and they totally missed out on FIDO and app-builders. Not to speak of Apple, which was a major biometric player with the launch of the 5S that year.
Reed/Elsevier just played safe and did the trick they'd done for a decade. Now in 2015, the #Biometrics2015 is basically diminished to nothing to be part off anymore. There were a few old players (HID, Cogent & Wacom) a 2 mobile biometric solutions and Fujisoft, a vein vendor (old Sony-stuff, but revived)and yes NokNok was there, I said hi to Jamie.
I met old friends now working at Crossmatch, talked business, and basically agreed not to meet at Biometrics anymore but at more inspiring events or locations.
This was my last BiometricsXXXX, goodbye Queen Elizabeth II Centre, Goodbye Reed/Elsevier. I hope life treats you well, but somehow I think this was the last that we've seen from Reed/Elsevier on biometrics too.

Fujisoft vein technology for physical and logical access