Mondex International Inc, the electronic cash and smart card company, is apparently struggling to differentiate between the strands of its company which, it says, has resulted in confusion in the marketplace about exactly what it does. Its answer? A new web site, nee Virtual Business Center. Mondex is 51% owned by MasterCard International and 49% owned by an international consortium of 28 banks. When it started back in 1992 and for many years after that, Mondex had just one product, a stored value smart card that acted like cash. Now it has multiple products thanks to its Multos operating system that sits on the card and enables it to store numerous applications simultaneously; not just cash value. These include loyalty schemes, transport and other forms of ticketing and so on. Multos has since been handed over to a consortium for development, the London-based Maosco. The new site (www.mondexinternational.com) also features a smart card resource search engine, that is a bespoke application produced for the London-based company by Thought Interactive Inc. It has so far crawled more than ten million pages on the web and returned around 70,000 that directly relate to the smart card industry.
