Super smart cards, resembling those piloted by the Thomas Cook tour operator subsidiary of Midland Bank Plc last spring (CI No 929), are now being exploited in a variety applications, reports the Wall Street Journal. The worldwide smart card market is still relatively small: current estimates put it at just $1,500m, and price remains a major obstacle to widespread exploitation. According to the Journal, super smart cards still cost between $25 and $30 to manufacture, compared with around $1 with the widely used but very limited magnetic stripe versions. But David Lanier, editor of Smart Card Reports, maintains that the US market alone could reach between $3,000m and $4,000m, during the 1990s. In the US, the Texas Turnpike Authority has introduced the use of super smart cards for collecting tolls on the Dallas North Tollway, thereby eliminating the need for cars to stop at the toll booth to pay. A card placed in the car window sends off a radio signal, picked up by an in-built identification code in the chip. Drivers simply recieve a monthly credit card bill. Similar schemes will shortly be introduced in New Orleans, Italy, and the UK. Smart cards are also being used by shipping and rail companies, to track the progress of containers, by peanut farmers to monitor how close they are to reaching production quotas, and by hospitals to store details of a patient’s medical history. US garages are considering using the cards to log maintenance and repairs carried out on a car. Japan is enthusiastic about the technology, and in France, the home of the smart card, cinemas are issuing cards representing 10 separate admission tickets, which also provide time and screening details of the films available. The area tipped to show explosive growth in the future is security. Cards that can be used to match retina or finger-print scans are already available, as are interactive versions which require the carrier to enter a series of passwords, before gaining access to a building or system. The chief of electronic product development at Battle Memorial Institute, Rich Rosen, believes that with the current range of smart card pilots, enough seeds have been planted. Some will sprout, he concludes.
