Compagnie des Machines Bull SA is going all out to capture a large slice of the $1bn smart card market, and at Washington’s CardTech/SecureTech show yesterday the company launched a series of new products and initiatives, including a collaboration with Visa International Inc. Bull and Visa agreed to collaborate on Java cards and point of sale terminals. Bull will develop Java terminal APIs to support Visa’s Open Platform specification (CI No 3,271), and will develop a simulator for software developers including the Java Virtual Machine, APIs and applications on a PC. The beta version will be out by June. Bull said it was the only company working on both card and terminal Java technologies with Visa, and for the general market. Visa has over 600 million credit cards out on the market. Also at the show, Bull released its Java Card 2.0 API-compliant development kit for its Odyssey series of cards, and launched its CC Duo cash card, a combined contact and contact-less card designed for contact-less applications such as ticketing as well as contact applications such as electronic purses or loyalty schemes. Bull also launched a new payment terminal for magnetic stripe cards, called Tango. Bull claims to have been in at the start of smart card development. In 1978, Bull’s Michel Ugon invented the first microcalculator card and registered the SPOM Self-Programmable- One-Chip Micro-Computer patent, which, says Bull, the 420m microprocessor-based smart cards now on the market still rely on. Since then Bull has added over 1,200 smart card related patents to its portfolio. Last month, Bull acquired the industrial and commercial card production and bureau activities of NBS Technologies Inc in Europe. The NBS plant, based on the outskirts of London, has an annual capacity of 60 million cards. Bull says it generated $237m in revenues from its smart card activities in 1997, 32% up from the previous year.
