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Veracode’s Chris Wysopal Appointed to Black Hat’s Content Review Panel

We were very excited and honored to announce that our own CTO and Co-Founder, Chris Wysopal, had been appointed to the Black Hat Review Board where he will advise Black Hat on its strategic direction, assist in reviewing and programming conference content, and provide extended reach into the research community. According to Trey Lord, General [...]

RuggedCom Vulnerabilities and You: Why SCADA Security Matters

In my last post, I mentioned a vulnerability affecting RuggedCom equipment. I should mention that RuggedCom has released a response to the vulnerability with specifics about models and software versions affected as well as possible mitigations. Here are a few issues to...

Twitter Claims a Victim: Francesca’s Holdings Fires CFO

The CFO of Francesca’s Holdings was an active tweeter and this cost him his job (Wall Street Journal). He ran afoul of rules and regulations that limit statements by officials of public companies. If this information leak was discovered, how...

The State Attorney General - A New Sheriff in Town

Without question, the federal government wields considerable power over the entire banking sector. However, it is easy to forget that state attorney generals can also exert tremendous force when they choose to do so.

Arguably the position of State Attorney General is one of the best platforms available to build a political brand. Until missteps in his personal life forced Eliot Spitzer a.k.a. the Sheriff of Wall Street, to resign as Governor of New York, the rumor mill had already mentioned “Spitzer” and “President of the United States” in the same breath. Whether Spitzer stood a chance of being elected leader of the free world is anyone’s guess. However, had he done so, many would likely agree that his position as the state attorney general would represent one of the “tipping points”. It is certainly important to note that Spitzer’s popularity stemmed in large part due to his focus on protecting consumer rights by using his platform as Attorney General to target companies that the federal government seemed unable or unwilling to investigate.

Fast forward to 2012, banks are wrestling with the revised FFIEC Authentication Guidance and the specific steps that they need to take to comply. There are few “bright lines”...

Interview with Dan Guido at SOURCE Boston 2012 – Part 2

In this second segment of the interview with Dan Guido, CEO and co-founder of Trail of Bits, Dan focuses on vulnerabilities in mobile devices, and shares the outcome of his research findings that he presented at SOURCE called “Mobile Exploit Intelligence Project”.

Mobile in Business: Protecting Your Company and Its Employees

With the mobile space interconnecting all of us, how do companies protect against their biggest liability? Their employees. Last week, a new Nielsen survey reported that over 50 percent of U.S. consumers own smartphones over older feature-based devices. So as...

What is Data Integrity? Learn How to Ensure Database Data Integrity via Checks, Tests, & Best Practices

Data integrity is a fundamental component of information security. In its broadest use, “data integrity” refers to the accuracy and consistency of data stored in a database, data warehouse, data mart or other construct. The term – Data Integrity – can be used to describe a state, a process or a function – and is [...]

Weekly News Roundup

Happy Friday all! Make the day go by a little faster by taking some time out to catch up with a few highlights from this week’s news stories: Twitter In The News: An interesting occurrence with Twitter this week was the supposed hack that resulted in the posting of over 50,000 user names and passwords [...]

Massive Attack on Natural Gas Infrastructure is Likely Advance Guard

The DHS is reporting on a massive campaign targeting natural gas infrastructure. So far it seems that little is known – so little that DHS has asked some companies to leave the malware in place so its behavior can be...

Interview with Dan Guido at SOURCE Boston 2012 – Part I

We recently sat down with Dan Guido, CEO and Co-Founder of Trail of Bits at SOURCE Boston 2012, to get his views on topics related to application security. In the first of a three part segment, Dan's commentary focuses on vulnerabilities in general. You can watch the interview here.

The Security Performance Tax Refund

At a fundamental level all types of Security products—AV, HIPS, IDS, AWL, etc.—tap into the same activity streams: what data or resource is being accessed in what context. Techniques may vary—mini and legacy filters, SSDT patching, import/export table patching, and...

Data Mining A Mountain of Zero Day Vulnerabilities – Webinar Q&A

With a goal of helping people understand the overall state of application security, Chris Wysopal, Veracode’s CTO and Co-Founder, recently gave a webinar, “Data Mining a Mountain of Zero-Day Vulnerabilities.” Chris examined the anonymized vulnerability data set produced by Veracode over the course of our analysis of thousands of applications submitted to us by large [...]

FileVault: Another Hit to Apple’s Security

For anyone who has encrypted their files with the legacy version of the FileVault software, and since upgraded to OS X Lion 10.7.3, you could have presented plain text files containing all of your user logins to any additional user...

Mobile Shopping Spring Conference Takeaways

Optaros attended Mobile Shopping Spring, a WBR conference in San Diego last week to engage with retail brands and learn some of the innovative ways they’re approaching mobile commerce. Mobile will continue to grow and will increasingly play a vital role in the sales funnel of all commerce transactions. It’s no longer acceptable to ignore the mobile | View post »

Cybersecurity Risks in Public Companies Infographic

Following new SEC guidance issued in the US relating to disclosure of cybersecurity risks in company filings, public companies are beginning to be measured by regulators and investors on the strength of their cybersecurity solution and ability to protect intellectual property and customer data. This infographic looks at the state of software security in public companies, and shows why companies and investors alike should care.

RFID Garment Tracking at Disney

I could write a flowery post about this deployment of ThingMagic RFID readers, but I think it would be more compelling if I just stick to the facts. If you have a large inventory of garments that you need to track, take a look at the following ROI case and then contact us to discuss how RFID can help save you time and money.

Disney is using UHF RFID to track $100 million worth of costumes.
The solution has saved the company more than a million dollars.
Inventory counting times have been reduced from approximately 180 labor hours (within larger costume storage areas) to about two hours.
The system has increased the accuracy of inventory checks, from 85 to 90 percent accurate to nearly 100 percent.
The need to staff checkout counters has been eliminated, freeing up personnel for other tasks.

This is how it works. A Disney cast member walks through rows of costumes at one of the 25 storage areas. She selects her costume garments and proceeds to a kiosk with an integrated ThingMagic RFID reader. The cast member swipes her ID badge through a bar-code reader at the kiosk, where her face and name are displayed on a video screen. The RFID reader captures the garments’ tag IDs and feeds that information to the Disney garment management software. Voila. Cinderella is off to greet her fans without a moment’s delay.

When the cast member is done for the day, she puts her costume into a laundry chute where another ThingMagic RFID reader captures the tag IDs. The status of the garments is updated, noting when they enter and exit the laundry area. This same process works with uniforms for band members, wait staff, and… well, you get the picture.

Disney also uses RFID-enabled inventory cycle count carts to expedite inventory counts in their costume storage areas. What previously involved 15 to 20 employees manually scanning barcodes for nine to twelve hours can now be completed by one or two workers in about one hour.

The solution paid for itself in less than a year.

(Image source: RFID Journal RFID Helps Disney Employees Get Into Character)

CISPA: How Information Sharing Could Actually Help

CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) is a tricky animal to assess. With the bill passing in the House of Representatives and moving to a vote in the Senate, the privacy debate has changed. Perhaps it’s the fact that...

Weekly News Roundup

TGIF! There was certainly a lot happening in the cybersecurity space this past week. Here are our picks for the top stories. Have a great weekend readers! Also, if you would like to get a understanding of how to build and scale an Application Security program within your organization, check out Veracoder Fergal Glynn’s latest [...]

Social Phishing: The Threat of Facebook Hacks and Twitter Spam

As the web becomes more social, so does its vulnerabilities. To offer some perspective, Facebook now has over 901 million active users, with the possibility of reaching 1 billion by years end – insane. Twitter also has approximately 130 million...

Gamification on a Grand Scale

I’ve written several posts on Gamification in the recent past and it’s something that I believe, if thoughtfully applied to a problem domain, can increase not only user / consumer engagement but will also increase loyalty and customer expansion. This week I viewed a TED talk by Regina Dugan, the former Director of DARPA, now | View post »

Reducing Food Waste with RFID

You could feed a small country with the food you threw away! How many of you heard that growing up from your parents? Well, maybe they were onto something.

The cost of food these days makes it much more difficult for many to buy lunch at work when they have cold cuts, lettuce and tomatoes at home that will go bad if not used to make a sandwich. When going out to eat, we can justify the large portions by knowing we can take a doggie bag home, but half the time it gets forgotten in the restaurant or brought home and tossed in the trash after a few days.

South Korea may have found the next best thing; deterring people from wasting food. An RFID-based system charges people for the food they throw away.

As reported by Earth911.com, SK Telecom has developed bins that will weigh food that is thrown out. Using RFID, the bins will calculate a disposal fee based on the exact weight, which will then be debited from the person’s public transportation card or billed to a credit card.

It works in much the same way an RFID-enabled check out at a grocery store might work. The person taps the bin where there is a reader waiting to read an RFID-enabled card. The lid opens, and the person can throw out their unwanted leftovers. The bin then weighs the food waste and informs the person of the subsequent fee.

According to a city government official, they expect their approach (which includes a home kitchen system) to help reduce 670 tons of food waste per day, cut the total amount of refuse by 20 percent by 2014, contributing to savings of 19.5 billion won (over $17M USD) per year.

Good idea, don't you think? Anything to help reduce waste of any kind is A OK in our book. I’d like to enforce a similar practice in my house. I wouldn’t necessarily charge my children, but having them think twice about over-serving themselves and throwing away food is a good thing.

Once the mindset is established, we might start to incorporate this thinking into our decision-making process. At a restaurant, we may decide that while it might be nice to order an appetizer, entre and dessert, while sampling the bread, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll be able to eat it all. We may make better decisions with waste reduction in mind, and skip the appetizer in favor of the bread.

This is a great example of RFID helping to Reduce. We’ve also seen how RFID can help Reuse. We’ll take it upon ourselves to find a successful use for RFID in Recycling and report back.

Software Security: A Chief Financial Officer’s Perspective

I was having a chat with our CFO by the Keurig machine and he said something I thought was interesting – that one of the things the CFOs of public companies worry about the most is surprises. Surprise, you woke up today and found that 10% of the value of your company is gone because [...]

A Brief Field Guide to Post-UDID Unique IDs on iOS

In iOS 5.0, the call to retrieve the device-specific unique identifier (“UDID”) of an iOS device — specifically, the accessor to UIDevice’s uniqueIdentifier property — was officially marked as deprecated. This probably wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone involved in mobile privacy and application development. For over a year, researchers have been pointing out [...]

Catch Them If You Can

Frank Abagnale Jr. successfully performed cons worth millions of dollars by posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot, a Georgia doctor, and a Louisiana parish prosecutor. He did all that in the 60s and his primary crime was check fraud, as documented in the biographical movie, Catch Me If You Can. Imagine what Frank could do in today’s banking environments with all its complex cross-channels.

Today, fraudster’s schemes evolve faster than Frank Abagnales ever did. This consistent evolution of fraud schemes demands that financial institutions audit their fraud detection solutions and scenarios on a fairly regular basis.

Performing a solution audit would determine the level of effectiveness of your institution's fraud coverage. It would identify additional areas of coverage that could be achieved by fully exploiting the existing data, as well as adding new data sources to improve current detection. It would also help prioritize recommendations and ...

Improving Healthcare Experience with Social Media

With the advent of social media, the frequency and reach of social interactions changed forever. While I firmly believe activities like commerce have always been social activities (i.e., before Facebook, Twitter, et al), what social media changed was access to our networks and the immediacy of feedback. We have seen the effect that social media has had upon eCommerce | View post »

Survey Rates Anonymous Top Threat: Here’s 4 Reasons Why Anonymous Won’t Hack You [INFOGRAPHIC]

Anonymous. Largely one of the most popular hacktivist groups on the planet was regarded by IT professionals as the top threat to companies in our recent survey (report, INFOGRAPHIC). But really, does Anonymous pose a threat to most of us? Hardly....

Toll Roads and Car Management Improve with RFID

While reviewing content on our Web site recently, I visited the RFID Basics page where we use an example of a car passing through a toll booth to describe how RFID works. It is a great example because you’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t driven through a Fast Lane, EZ-Pass, or other electronic toll collection system. Does anyone know when the first RFID-enabled toll booth was deployed in the United States? We’ll give you the answer in a bit.

An often reported benefit of RFID is that you can leverage it for a project, process, or procedure, and it ends up providing value beyond what it was originally intended for. Even back when it was first introduced for toll roads, other than making the driver’s life easier, this RFID-enabled system helped states increase revenue and allowed law enforcement to set up more accurate notifications in Amber Alert or stolen car situations.

Taking the convenience factor even further, because of RFID, many highways now have no toll booths. Not because they aren’t collecting tolls, but because they have implemented RFID in such a way that the tags attached to car windshields can be read at high speeds and with excellent accuracy. No big, cumbersome collection booths required.

Coincidentally, at the time of writing this post, I saw the following headline: India's first RFID technology toll comes up near Chandigarh. According to the article, India's first RFID-based toll plaza was recently inaugurated on National Highway No.5 at Chandimandir in Haryana's Panchkula district. The anticipated benefits are many: seamless travel, time and fuel savings, and a reduction in traffic jams. My guess is they will realize other benefits along the way as well.

Now back to our quiz. The first RFID-enabled toll booth was deployed in Dallas in 1989. Were you close?

FIPS Compliance May Actually Make OpenSSL Less Secure

There was a recent disclosure of an important OpenSSL vulnerability recently that’s gotten a lot of attention, and deservedly so. SSL is one important means of securing communications these days, for online banking and shopping, as well as web applications...

Review: Roadmap to Revenue

I received an eBook a few months ago entitled, “Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customer Want to Buy” by Kristin Zhivago and was asked if I would read and review it for my blog. I have received numerous items to review and blog about over the past year and I don’t | View post »

Can RFID Bring Manufacturing Back to the U.S?

“American Manufacturing Has Declined More Than Most Experts Have Thought.” That was the headline of a March 28 Huffington Post article. Manufacturing is in the spotlight now that Washington politicians are trying to find ways to bring the trade back from overseas and make the United States a manufacturing hub once again. The top most common reasons that businesses sent their manufacturing outside the U.S. during the last decade were high labor costs and high corporate taxes. The quest for viable margins prompted the mass exodus.

The retail industry was an early adopter of RFID because the benefits to all aspects of the supply chain were abundantly clear. Supply chain efficiency has a tremendous impact on manufacturing margins, which makes RFID an easy bet for this industry as well.

We all know that RFID can be used in many ways to create more efficient processes which leads to lower costs and stronger bottom lines. In manufacturing and distribution environments, the implementation of RFID can reduce labor costs by reducing the workforce needed for inventory management, among other things. RFID can also store all of the history associated with a product, which helps minimize support warranties and optimize recall processes. While we don’t know yet if RFID can help reduce government imposed taxes, the benefits that RFID delivers can certainly help offset those taxes. Benefits include: increased throughput and productivity; shorter order cycles; faster shipping; more efficient inventory management; increased profit margins and better customer service.

It’s clear why manufacturers are looking to RFID to help them run more efficient operations that minimize production down time, optimize material and parts inventories and improve labor output. Of course we understand that the manufacturing companies are working with restricted budgets these days, which is another reason why RFID is a prime technology to for this market. By applying RFID incrementally across a plant floor, manufacturers can easily integrate the data captured by RFID, without disruption, into the existing infrastructure and processes.

The newly acquired, real-time visibility into the supply chain can yield tangible benefits almost immediately by letting manufacturers make more informed decisions and minimize costly errors. Could RFID in the manufacturing supply chain be just what the doctor ordered? It seems too good to be true that implementing a low cost, highly effective technology could bring an entire industry back from the brink of extinction; at least extinction in the United States. But if there was one technology that could do that, it’s no surprise that it would be RFID.

We’re not the only ones who recognize the critical role RFID can play in breathing life into manufacturing. The recentl RFID Journal LIVE! conference ran a track dedicated to Manufacturing and Operational Efficiency. Companies like Deere & Co., Boeing and Mitsubishi shared their compelling success stories. Hopefully other manufacturers will follow suit and put the U.S. back on the manufacturing map.

If you have an RFID manufacturing success story you’d like to share, please tell us about it.

Impatient America: Response Time in the Era of Immediacy

Anyone that travels knows about delays, and I’ve experience plenty of those. Delays due to weather, mechanical issues, air traffic control, delayed flight crews and many other things make travel the wonderfully glamorous experience it is. Of course, I say this a bit tongue-in-cheek as it’s still amazing to me that a few hundred dollars | View post »

Business at the Speed of RFID

You could fill in the blank with any number of words. Business benefit from the Speed of RFID, ...from the Accuracy of RFID, ...from the Efficiency of RFID, ...from the Personalization of RFID, ...from the Profitability of RFID …you get the picture.

All you have to do is check out the list of industries represented at this year's RFID Journal LIVE! conference. It is a pretty broad list, illustrating the value and reach of the technology: Defense/Aerospace; Health Care/Pharmaceutical; Manufacturing/Operational Efficiency and Retail/Apparel.

Among the companies within these industries are several that are working with ThingMagic to bring innovative solutions to market, improve productivity, and gain a competitive advantage. We are proud to be working with many award winners and presenters at RFID Journal LIVE! 2012 and years past. Check 'em out here:

Keonn - Winner of "Coolest Demo" Award at RFID Journal LIVE! 2012

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts U.S. - Presenter - Improving Supply Chain Logistics: Using RFID to Speed Up Inventory Management at Disney. Check out the RFID Journal article on the solution here: RFID Helps Disney Employees Get Into Character

Seeonic - RFID Journal LIVE! 2012 Best in Show finalist

Gerry Weber International - RFID Journal LIVE! 2011 Best RFID Implementation Award

The Disney Family Cancer Center - RFID Journal LIVE! 2010 Most Innovative Use of RFID Award

The RFID Journal Awards recognize companies that have distinguished themselves by their successful use of RFID or introduction of a valuable new RFID product or services. A full list of award winners at RFID Journal LIVE! 2012 can be found here. A full list of the Coolest Demo Contest participants are listed here. We know who are favorites are! How about you?

Google Glass: A Glimpse Into The Internet of Things?

I first saw TV ads for Google Glass while in Orlando for RIFD Journal LIVE! (more about the conference in a future post). About what you'd exepct from Google - an imaginative glimpse into the future of computing and human interaction.

I have to admit I didn't make the immediate connection between Google's view of the future and the Internet of Things. But Mark Beccue of ABI Research did, and it is an intersting read - see the full copy of Mark's piece here and let us (and Mark) know what you think.

Google Glass: A Glimpse Into The Internet of Things?

Posted Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:10:00 EDT by Mark Beccue

Last week, Google announced Project Glass, an ambitious project to feed on-demand, real time data onto eyeglasses http://bit.ly/HeSg62. The project has produced skepticism and mocking, both of which I think are unjustified. Google is merely nudging us along to an eventuality - the click less, swipe less web interface and the internet of things.

Last year, I wrote a report on mobile augmented reality http://bit.ly/hycWOK in which we found that many enterprising companies are seeking to expand the internet to become even more useful than it is today. Visionaries at companies like Google, Intel, Metaio, and DoCoMo http://bit.ly/AyGQuz believe there will be a day when we can attach data, graphics, audio or video to objects such as buildings, vehicles, machinery or a location. This data could then be accessed using augmented reality technology - either through a smartphone app through which you would see or hear the data as you looked at the object, or eventually through glasses.

While today we are seeing the emergence of smartphone apps and AR, there are lots of challenges before any of this happens for eyewear. Applications would require filters because of information overload - our brains can't handle too much data at one time. One solution in that respect could be you as a consumer choose the apps you would like to run through your eyewear, just as smartphone users choose apps and run them today on their phones. Industrial and military uses of augmented reality eyewear produce significant eye fatigue. And how would eyewear and smartphones peacefully coexist over time? And then there are issues around attaching data to things -- indoor AR today is limited because of GPS, and image recognition requires huge, cross-referenced databases.

But it is easy to see why Google is so interested. Search expands when internet expands, and where search goes, so goeth Google.

I believe Google will showcase Google Glass to promote the technology and look to eyewear and smartphone makers to make eyewear eventually. They will potentially make eyewear (with a partner), but as with Google phone and new Google branded tablet, Google knows the key is to make click less touch less web interface and the internet of things universal.

--end ABI article

Fighting Fraud in Canada

Most people who have been on the good side of the Financial Crimes business know – it is easy to become cynical and suspicious of almost everyone. I guess when you are looking for criminal activity all day, you are supposed to have a 'glass half empty’ approach. To my surprise, I have found that many fraud personnel I’ve met are very optimistic…about catching fraud, that is. And, after meeting with several of them last month, I am even more aware of what a collaborative effort fighting fraud needs to be.

At the beginning of the month, Memento had our inaugural Canadian User Group meeting. Almost 30 users from our Canadian customers came together at the Toronto Board of Trade to network with their peers, discuss recent fraud events and ...

Spring Cleaning Your Fraud Scenarios

Spring has arrived, which means it’s time to put away all the winter stuff and make space for what you’ll need for the new season. Instead of just cleaning out your closets, why not take a fresh look at your organization’s fraud management system and ‘de-clutter’ your scenarios?

Reviewing your list of scenarios is important to ensure that your fraud team is focusing on the highest priority scenarios that impact your bank, and that you are getting maximum value from your enterprise detection system. Fraud schemes and schemers are constantly changing, and enterprise monitoring systems need to keep pace with new trends, government regulations, and loopholes in your bank’s systems.

The first step is to take stock of what you have, and gauge its value. If you are not already maintaining a scenario inventory, consider developing a tracking system that includes the following:

• A clear, written description of the fraud scenario appropriate for business users (a.k.a. the “English description”)
• A description of each of the data fields required to run ...

More Takeaways from the BAI Conference

Notes from Memento's Michael Wlodyka, Fraud Consultant, and Matt Doremus, Sr. Solutions Architect

Michael Wlodyka, Memento Fraud Consultant, on Reputational Risk

On day 2 of the BAI Payments Connect 2012 conference, I had the opportunity to attend a very interesting presentation by John Carlson, EVP for fraud prevention and cyber security at BITS, entitled ‘Hardening’ Payment Systems for the Next Generation. In his talk, John highlighted the fact that trust and reputation are two of the most valuable assets that financial institutions have in retaining existing customers and acquiring new clients.

Whether deserved or not, the persistent threats of account takeover, identity theft, check, card, ACH, wire, and mortgage fraud, along with continued insider and elder abuse can lead to a perception of insecurity. In order to effectively combat the increased risk of new channels, players, and products, there is a need for cooperation between and amongst financial institutions and their providers ...

RFID is Part of the DNA

As you know, our position at ThingMagic is that the ongoing and recent advances in RFID lend themselves very well to the technology becoming integrated into more things, and as such, more ubiquitous. Today, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and solution providers are starting to consider RFID as they design end-user solutions, versus adding RFID onto the solution after the fact.

As OEMs evaluate building their own readers, there are three basic options available:

Costly & Complex = Purchasing all of the necessary discreet components and building their own readers
Less Complex, but Not Ideal = Purchasing reader chips with software to design and build their own readers
Faster, Better, Cheaper = Purchasing a fully functional and globally certified reader module that can be easily integrated into a wide range of products

A decade ago, when RFID readers weren't available in as many finished and embedded form factors as they are today, and companies didn’t think twice about dedicating a team of engineers to create the entire RFID communication system from scratch, the first option might be considered acceptable. But these days, unless you have time and money to burn, building from scratch doesn’t make much sense; especially when you throw regulatory certifications into the mix.

The second option is definitely less expensive and less time consuming than the first, but it still introduces significant challenges. With the reader chip and reference design, there are significant development, testing and certification requirements that take precious time and money.

Option number three is the most efficient approach available. With embedded RFID modules, OEMs can very easily incorporate RFID into pretty much anything such as handhelds, printers, vehicles, retail point-of-sale (POS) and security devices and much, much more, at a significantly lower total cost of ownership.

Our own Ravi Pappu walks us through the steps and requirements involved with each of the three approaches in this RFID.net video , “How to Build an RFID Reader, Part 1: Discrete reader, IC, or Module?”

If you’ve been following our blogs, you’ll know that the applications and solutions that can be RFID-enabled are endless. It’s no longer feasible to reinvent the wheel.

To learn more, Download our Whitepaper: Getting a Read on Embedded UHF RFID: Why RFID Modules are the Smart Choice for Developing Next-Generation Solutions!

Brick and Mortar Renaissance Webinar by Peter Sheldon; A Review Part 2

On March 7th, I attended a Forrester Webinar by Peter Sheldon Peter Sheldon on the “Brick and Mortar Renaissance”. Peter confirmed that online sales are forecasted to grow to 9% of overall retail spend by 2016. His premise is that this growth will require stores to come up with new ways to attract and interact | View post »

Notes from 2012 BAI Payments Connect

Every year, Memento attends the BAI Payments conference to learn the latest trends in payments and fraud as well as connect with attendees, many of whom are our customers and partners. This year’s conference focused on three key areas: emerging payments, payments fraud, and check processing. Being part of the team that designs and develops the fraud detection and management software for Memento, I was very interested in learning more about the new and emerging payment channels, where FIs stand with their FFIEC/layered security strategy, and, of course, where FIs see the biggest need for innovation.

Day 1 Highlights

Payment innovation and mobile banking were central conference themes. The mobile phone is trending as a preferred channel (“top of wallet”) for small dollar payments. Banks are racing to figure out how this changes their business model and product offerings.

Some view peer-to-peer (P2P) payments as a promising new revenue stream. As a quick definition, a P2P payment uses an email address or mobile number to identify the payment beneficiary. (Examples: send a gift, settle the dinner tab, payback for a shared household expense.) Everyone agrees that P2P is emerging and malleable with flexible audiences and flexible delivery options. The offerings will most certainly also enable P2G (person to group, e.g. pay soccer team), P2B (person to business, pay small service provider), B2P etc.

Benefits for consumers:
- Convenience, convenience, convenience. Payments can be initiated anytime, anywhere.
- Timing of payments may be more immediate.

Opportunities for Financial Institutions:
- Strengthen relationship with customers and ...

Out with Dewey Decimal, In with RFID

My guess is that Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey wouldn't be too upset with advancements of today's library systems. Dewey was a pioneering influence in the development of libraries in America at the beginning of the 20th century. And yes, he is best known for the classification system that is used in most public and school libraries - know as the Dewey Decimal System.

But the decimal system was just one of a long list of Dewey's innovations. Dewey is also known for the creation of hanging vertical files and for founding the Library Bureau, a private company created "for the definite purpose of furnishing libraries with equipment and supplies of unvarying correctness and reliability."

Hmmm... sounds a little like what RFID aims to do - improve processes by applying a technology that delivers "unvarying correctness and reliability".

Leave it to RFID to handily replace a system that’s been in place for 135 years. RFID in libraries is not a new concept, but we wanted to dedicate today’s blog post to it for a few reasons.

The more well-known uses for RFID in libraries are for anti-theft measures and to reduce the amount of time required to perform circulation operations. The time savings are a result of the fact that information can be read from RFID tags much faster than from barcodes, and several books in a stack can be read at the same time. Using wireless technology, it becomes much easier and faster to update the inventory and identify the books that are misplaced.

Aside from the common and very useful deployments, there are many more uses of RFID in libraries. For example, people can find exactly where a book is, even if it’s on the wrong shelf or even in the wrong section. That’s a key element that sets RFID apart from the Dewey Decimal System. Sorry Mr. Dewey.

Another not-so-known benefit is that RFID can be used to track reference books which are used at the library instead of being taken out. Without RFID, the only way to know which items were being used frequently, was for a librarian to actually see the books in use and which ones were being left on tables; obviously not a precise method. Barcoding, Inc. has developed an RFID system that tells librarians how often books are taken from shelves, and how long they are off the shelf. With this system, seldom used reference materials can be kept in storage rooms, leaving the shelf space for the more popular books.

Barcodes, which are most commonly used today, can be replaced with RFID tags which last much longer. Remember when we took out a book from the school library and you wrote your name and date on a card that went in a pocket on the inside cover? I do. Those were replaced by barcodes, and now it may be time for them to retire. RFID tags last longer than barcodes because fewer things come into contact with them. Many are placed inside the cover or binding. Some RFID vendors claim approximately 100,000 transactions before a tag may need to be replaced.

You may be saying to yourself, is it really necessary to deploy RFID systems in libraries? I bet you remember (again, I do) looking for a book for a school project and finding the empty space on the shelf where it was supposed to be, and the librarian was certain that the book had not been taken out. You either had to look around on nearby shelves hoping it was close by, or come back the next day hoping it turned up and was put back in its place. Either way, the school project got completed and we somehow survived.

But, ask yourself this question. Can libraries afford not to implement an RFID system? As noted by consultant Karen Coyle, library circulation, the primary function where RFID can make a significant impact, is increasing, while library budgets are on the decline. As with most RFID projects, they can be easily integrated with a minimal up-front investment. They can provide a speedy ROI, helping control circulation costs that are on the rise.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather know that my hometown library is still around and doing well, event at the expense of the Dewey Decimal System.

Brick and Mortar Renaissance Webinar by Peter Sheldon (Forrester); A Review Part 1

Today I attended a Forrester Webinar by Peter Sheldon on the “Brick and Mortar Renaissance”. Peter confirmed that online sales are forecasted to grow to 9% of overall retail spend by 2016. His premise is that this growth will require stores to come up with new ways to attract and interact with their customers seamlessly | View post »

The ‘Cost of Doing Business’ Trap

I was reading a comment on a Memento blog post, “2011 Fraud Trends – 3 Key Takeaways”, and it got me to thinking about what “cost effective” really means. In this case, it’s really about the cost of doing business.

It is not uncommon to take the position that fraud is “a cost of doing business”. When we view it from that perspective, we need to consider the total cost of doing business when it comes to fraud.

With regard to having insurance policies cover fraud losses, I am curious to know what exactly does this insurance cover? What are the deductibles? What other non-loss impacts does a fraud event have on the bank? Take into account customer loss, higher operational costs for customer service, reputational risk (that’s not just your reputation with ...

RFID Revolutionizes the Electric Vehicle Industry

Remote car starters. Curtain side airbags. Cars that you can talk to and that talk back. Those luxuries are old news these days, having made their way into almost every car on the road.

Wireless cars that are connected to databases of information as well as connected to each other are being reported on a lot in the media today. It won’t be long before those cars are on the road telling their drivers where they can go for Sushi, and if they have a new email which can be displayed on the dash for safe viewing.

Electric cars were once thought of as futuristic, but these too have become a reality. Down the road (pun intended!), we should expect to be surrounded by them. Right now they are mostly compact and well suited for driving and parking in space-constrained metro areas. But because of the advantages they afford us, we see that industry grow, and grow successfully in part, with the help of RFID.

First let’s take a step back and review what RFID has done for the automotive industry as a whole.

Location of Cars

How many times have you been so ready for a vacation, eagerly taking the keys from the rental car agent, only to spend 30 minutes waking around a hot parking lot with your family and suitcases because you can’t find your car? We’ve seen how RFID with GPS makes this practice a lot more convenient for the customer and far more efficient for the rental agency. The benefits are clear: visibility of all cars in the lot; immediate availability of cars as they are needed; improved inventory management so popular cars are on-hand more often; and reduction of paperwork and manual record keeping. A no brainer!

Parking Garage Access

The type of RFID implementation to locate cars also works for fleet management and parking garage access and payment. Long-range identification in combination with high-speed RFID is the best option for hands-free identification of cars as they enter and exit a parking facility. Parking facilities and parking garages at airports feel the pressure to find ways to grow revenue. RFID helps achieve that goal by bringing increased efficiency, security and convenience, while minimizing environmental impact. Pretty soon we won’t need to remember to bring our parking tickets with us to pay the cashier before we leave a garage, which is obviously not very convenient.

Anti-theft

We’re not talking about LoJack, although that does use radio frequency for location tracking. We’re referring to a use case where European manufacturers used RFID as “car immobilizers.” The keys are equipped with an RFID tag, and an interrogator installed in the steering column. In order to start the vehicle, the reader validates the unique identification number from the RFID-enabled key. A duplicate key would not be able to start the car because it wouldn’t be able to pass the reader’s verification without the tag.

Recharging Stations

Now, getting back to the electric car. The advent of this development has brought about another automotive market need that RFID is helping to serve - wireless charging stations.

EV-Charge America’s approach to electric vehicle charging stations uses a wireless, networked, meshed-LAN array of subscription-based stations that can be located anywhere with Google Maps, OnStar, hand-held devices and smartphones. Once at an EV Charging Station, drivers can unlock it, activate it and start the flow of electricity by waving their RFID-enabled key ring in front of the unit's reader.

To charge an EV at IKEA San Diego, drivers swipe their RFID-enabled Blink InCard, plug the charger into the EV, and then shop at their leisure in the IKEA store while the vehicle is charging.

Coulomb Smartlet charging stations will eventually let drivers use an RFID-enabled credit or debit card to pay for their electricity. Subscribers are issued cards equipped with a high-frequency passive RFID tags so they can simply hold their card up to an RFID interrogator embedded in the Smartlet unit.

A ZigBee transceiver, compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, is used to pass the captured data to a ZigBee gateway, which then passes the data to a central server containing software that validates the card's ID number and account status – in real-time. Not to mention that the signal between the card and reader will be encrypted to secure the data transmitted by the cards. Without this added protection, people would most likely hesitate to take advantage of the benefits of paying with RFID credit and debit cards.

In the same way that RFID is reshaping aspects of the retail and healthcare markets, it is revolutionizing the Electric Vehicle industry which is still arguably in the nascent stage. If it can help shape an industry that has not had time to mature, imagine what RFID can do for a well established industry.

Where Does Your Food Come From? RFID Knows.

Each year about 1 in 6 people in the United States gets sick from eating contaminated food, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Salmonella is responsible for many of the reported outbreaks and causes more hospitalizations and deaths than any other type of germ found in food. While E. Coli infections have been drastically reduced, there has been no reduction in people getting sick from Salmonella.

One way to cut down on illness caused by Salmonella is to apply lessons learned from past outbreaks as depicted below.

View larger version of the diagram (source: CDC)

Efforts to educate about prevention can be supplemented by enhancing the traceability of food shipments within the supply chain. The Food Safety Modernization Act calls for the FDA to focus on new food traceability rules to prevent contamination.

A report issued recenlty by ABI Research, “RFID-enabled Food Safety and Traceability Systems,” reviews the Food Safety Modernization Act and provides forecasts for the use of RFID-enabled devices in cold chain applications. RFID allows the food industry to trace food items and record environmental conditions throughout the entire supply chain.

Sensors in RFID tags monitor the temperature and humidity of products. They can detect if the temperature for a specific food item goes above or below the ideal temperature, at any given time, and record that detail. Tags can be used on anything in the supply chain from the farms, to slaughterhouses, to pallets, to shipping containers, to grocery stores. Even the cows and pigs can be tagged.

You may remember the Orange Juice recall from this past January. CNNMoney noted that if there is wide adoption of a traceability solution in the industry, it could stop the contaminated food from being put onto store shelves in the first place, and help stop outbreaks before they start.

Aside from preventing food borne illnesses, ABI Research also points out that the information delivered by an RFID traceability solution could have a significant impact on the $35 billion a year in wasted produce. With the environment detail captured by the RFID readers during the supply chain, a grocer or manufacturer can determine precisely which containers were exposed to temperatures outside of the ideal range, and discard only those containers instead of discarding the entire shipment.

The prevention of waste or food borne illness is enough to warrant an RFID food traceability mandate in my book. Being able to impact both? I’ll let you do the math.

Ramnit, Facebook, and Password Management – Oh My!

I was reading an article about the Ramnit worm a few weeks back and a few things struck me about it. First of all, this worm is “old” technology – at least in the cyber war sense – that is evolving. It reminds me of a blog I wrote a while ago on polymorphism and the Zeus Trojan. At that time, I thought a common misconception was that once you find malware and take action against it you’re safe. It wasn’t so then and it isn’t so now.

Interestingly in this case, Trusteer, a provider of cybercrime prevention solutions, was the first to discover Ramnit’s merger with Zeus in August 2011. That tidbit combined with another point in the article about how Ramnit is being used to attack Facebook credentials is bad news. The article provided this quote to point out the danger: “Dave Jevans of the Anti-Phishing Working Group says stealing credentials from social-networking sites is big business. “We have seen...

Phish Sings RFID’s Praises

As a Vermonter, I've been a long time Phish fan and I was excited to hear the recent announcement that the band would be part of the Bonnaroo Arts and Music Festival event this summer in Tennessee. As a technology marketer, I was even more excited when I discovered that Phish found a clever way to use RFID for its merchandising activities. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone who is familiar with the band. They are a very creative group.

As you may know, the band established a non-profit called WaterWheel Foundation whose mission is to raise funds for a non-profit organizations in each community in which Phish plays while on tour. They do this through donations and through selling t-shirts, hats, sweatshirts and other "dry goods".

At each show, WaterWheel volunteers unpack hundreds of items. The volunteers count each item, keep tally on paper, and then place them on display. At the end of the show, the merchandise is counted again, written down again and re-packed. Based on the counts, the volunteers order additional merchandise from its warehouse to be added to the inventory, which ships to the next tour location. We don’t have to spell it out for our readers. That process, as we know all too well, leaves a large margin for error. Not to mention extremely tedious and time consuming.

It turns out that Zander Livingston, founder of our partner, Truecount, is as big a Phish fan as well! To launch Phish's RFID use, Truecount donated the TC Mobile Merch RFID solution to the foundation to help improve its inventory process. Truecount and the WaterWheel volunteers would commission an RFID tag by linking an item's SKU number with the Electronic Product Code (EPC) number encoded on that tag. At the end of a each show, the merchandise booths were taken down, the RFID tags were read again. Volunteers could use the results from that final inventory scan to determine if and what additional items were needed at the next show venue.

RFID Journal reported that the inventory task can be accomplished within 10 to 12 minutes, instead of the two and a half hours it took without RFID. Matthew Beck, WaterWheel Foundation's touring director, told RFID Journal that he hopes the RFID technology might "stabilize the variables," and improve the accuracy of inventory counts, as well as save time.

Matthew, have no doubt, with RFID, you can accomplish just that.

RFID - Stand up and Be Counted!

As we gear up for HIMSS, we’re reminded of the benefits that RFID has brought to healthcare – tracking expiration dates of prescription medications, preventing surgical equipment loss, making processes more efficient, personalizing a patient’s experience – the list goes on and on. Let’s add another to the list - one that merits special attention. It’s the use of RFID to promote cancer awareness.

In Polk City, Florida, a group of breast cancer awareness activists held a Big Pink Ribbon event where thousands of individuals wearing pink ribbon t-shirts assembled for the cause. Each person was counted by team captains with check lists, hand tally counters and of course, RFID! Why did they want such a precise count? What better way to garner attention than to get into the book of Guinness World Records!

The University of South Florida Polytechnic, UPM RFID and Borda Technology used RFID readers, UHF tags and custom software to accurately identify each individual and provide a 100% accurate, real-time count of the total number of participants. The RFID solution included:

- Lanyards for all participants with UHF RFID tags, which supported the EPC Gen 2 RFID standard

- An RFID reader at the entrance portal with four downward-pointing antennas to count participants

- Software with a custom asset-tracking solution

The tags were used for precision counting with built-in redundancies. The readers captured participant data and transmitted that information to a custom asset-tracking software program. The RFID system would have immediately alerted the organizers if they had set the new world record for largest human-awareness ribbon. But it wasn’t in the cards this time. Even though the event didn’t make it into the book of Guinness World Records, they had a great turnout fulfilling their first objective - to educate more people about finding the cure for breast cancer.

We like how they showed another way in which RFID can be easily integrated into everyday lives. As you may remember, one of our missions last year was to promote awareness for RFID via our RFID100 campaign. Hopefully greater awareness of RFID and the cure for breast cancer will help each other succeed.

Hospitals Should Consider a Phased Approach to Deploying RFID

In our last post about RFID in healthcare, we explored the benefits of Passive UHF RFID.

RFID in general presents many benefits for the healthcare industry, such as high value asset tracking, materials management, patient and staff workflow, and being used to support compliance with industry mandates and regulations including Sarbanes-Oxley, JACHO and OSHA. Because of the variety of applications and departmental functions that can be supported by an RFID visibility solution, selecting the right solution, or even the right project to begin with, can be daunting.

Many hospitals have Wi-Fi infrastructures for their voice and data processing needs. However, few have the density of Wi-Fi access points necessary for accurate real-time location tracking. Implementing a new WLAN infrastructure, or even just updating the Wi-Fi coverage, can be costly. Even with the necessary Wi-Fi coverage, RTLS/Wi-Fi based tags may not work well for certain applications. Such hurdles can include large tag size, time-limited battery life, required periodic re-calibration to maintain location accuracy and limitations in high interference areas like radiology.

Implement Passive RFID First

While RFID technologies can help achieve certain objectives and lower costs, it is still necessary to consider the cost of infrastructure changes and time commitment required from hospital IT staff. With this in mind, a proven and practical approach is to start with low cost and easy to implement Gen2 Passive RFID. It limits the work required to the existing infrastructure and helps control costs. Gen 2 passive readers and tags can utilize the existing data processing network infrastructure and, in many cases, do not require extensive IT staff involvement to deploy. By utilizing lower cost, easy to deploy passive RFID-based systems as the initial step, hospitals can significantly improve productivity, offer enhanced patient services, and improve quality of care within current budget and IT program restraints – while having invested in a platform for growth.

A variety of reader and tag combinations allows hospitals to choose where they would like to deploy a Passive RFID visibility solution, usually based on where the need is greatest. The flexibility lets the hospitals be behind the wheel vs. being bound by any limitations from the technology. For example, a hospital can begin by tracking high-value mobile equipment such as wheelchairs, stretchers, crash carts, infusion pumps, etc. Other items in the hospital setting that can be monitored with RFID include:

Item-level pieces – surgical instruments and dressings, medicines, linens and uniforms
Medical records – files, documents, x-rays and other diagnostic images. RFID systems support the rollout of the electronic health records.
Patient movement and identification for proper administration of associated treatment plans

As the first high-value mobile equipment phase is completed and begins to yield a return on investment, the hospital can embark on the next phase. This phased approach allows a hospital department to measure and manage asset, material, patient and/or staff flow and productivity through each stage of the process. It’s been proven to deliver a near-immediate return on investment.

To learn more, download our case study: Greenville Hospital Deploys Integrated RFID Solution for Operating Room Asset Tracking

Check ThingMagic out at HIMSS where we’ll be showcasing healthcare operations made better with Passive RFID.

The Data Mining Debate

It goes without saying that banks have an abundance of data. It is the job of the fraud analysts and investigators to sift through various bits of data to find anomalies and resolve fraudulent activity. These fraud subject-matter-experts usually can develop their own ad-hoc queries to find the information they are looking for. Surely, with access to disparate data and the ability to run queries, they can uncover fraud without deploying someone else’s software….right?

Most of the time, the answer is a resounding “no”. Very few banks have ...

A Holistic Approach to Fraud and Risk

Bank Technology News (BTN) ran an article on the first of the year entitled “9 Trends Reshaping Risk Software”, and Trend 8, “The bringing together of different risk systems”, caught my eye (being a fraud guy). My observation over the years is that centralized / consolidated vs. decentralized/ siloed is a cyclical thing. The idea of consolidating and centralizing keeps coming back, so that tells me it is generally considered to be a good idea. One explanation for the cycle swinging the other way might be the technical issues associated with implementing the consolidated model. A common data model goes a long way toward resolving many technical issues and systems that run disparate solutions on a single data model are promising for the consolidated approach.

Reshaping the Way We Think about RFID

As published in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of PassAGEnow:

When predicting technology trends, Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences may have said it best:

“If history is any indication, we should assume that any technology that is going to have a significant impact over the next 10 years is already 10 years old!”

This theory holds true for several technologies. For example, the first mobile telephone call was made in 1946, many years before the first commercial cellular network was launched in 1979. GPS was in use for nearly 30 years in government and military programs before it became a must have for personal vehicle navigation. And, the formation of the Internet as we know it began in the 1980s, but wasn’t truly incorporated into virtually every aspect of modern human life until a decade later.

Applying this premise to radio frequency identification (RFID) seems to hold true as well. The technology itself was well over 10 years old in 2004 when retail giants began pushing it as a means of driving efficiencies into their supply chains. While these initial retail programs didn’t succeed according to plan, and mass adoption didn’t happen the way many analysts predicted, these initiatives did kick off a high level of interest from retailers, product manufacturers and many other industries and markets focused on improving their business and service processes. Between 2004 and now, something else happened that makes one ask if RFID is ready to have that significant impact Buxton mentions.

During this span, RFID hardware and software providers have continued to innovate and collaborate at a notable clip. RFID readers have evolved to include a wide variety of purpose-built and multi-use form factors. Smaller, more powerful embedded RFID modules are being used to enable many stationary and mobile devices with the auto-identification technology. These advancements, coupled with continued innovation in the RFID tag and software markets, have resulted in RFID system performance improving exponentially. While these advances are significant, I’m not suggesting that that there will be an ‘ah-ha’ moment when businesses and consumers realize that RFID is a technology they can’t live without. To the contrary, RFID adoption will likely be steady; finding its way into a greater number of solutions and replacing less effective legacy technologies as time goes on. A key point in all of this however, is that the technology itself has matured to a point where it is no longer a barrier to entry.

‘Climbing the Slope’

So where are we now, more than 40 years after the first passive radio transponder with memory was patented in 1970, and nearly eight years since the retail industry brought attention to RFID at a global scale? Confirming the market’s progress is evidence that RFID technology has passed several critical milestones of Gartner Research’s well known Hype Cycle, including first and second generation products, media hype, negative press, supplier consolidation and failures, and emerging methodologies and best practices. Taken at face value, this would put the market in the Hype Cycle’s Slope of Enlightenment stage and moving toward the emergence of third generation products, out-of-the box usability, and high growth adoption.

What’s more, businesses across all industries have a great number of well documented end user case studies and best practices to help them with their ROI analysis. Many pre-configured and kitted solutions are emerging, and ease-of-use features are starting to find their way into once highly-technical, hard to use products. Maybe most importantly, vendor promises and user expectations about performance have found solid common ground. Error rates have dropped significantly and there are many applications where 100 percent read rates are achieved. That said, users accept that there can be momentary losses of visibility of RFID tags owing to environmental factors and that software error correction, along with well-designed installations, should be a principal consideration in implementing successful solutions.

So now what?

It’s Time to Reshape the Way We Think About RFID

With the reliability of today’s RFID systems and the apparent progression through traditional stages of technology advancement, it’s time to reshape the way we think about RFID. RFID vendors and solution providers have survived the technology maturation process. End customer organizations of all sizes have learned where and when it makes the most sense to apply RFID to their business processes. Now it’s time to think beyond RIFD of the past 10 years and toward the next wave of innovation.

We should think beyond the underlying technology – and toward the value of the data, emerging methods of data access, and about the many innovative enterprise and consumer applications that can be enabled with RFID data.

We should think beyond one-size-fits-all readers – and toward the wide variety of fixed-position and embedded RFID reader form factors that can support a great number of unbelievably diverse applications.

We should think beyond siloed deployments of RFID – and toward the hardware, software and data becoming an integrated element of the enterprise.

We should think beyond the singular technology of RFID – and toward the combination of RFID and other technologies like GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

As an industry, we are beginning to see glimpses of this forward thinking. Technology vendors are more willing to collaborate. True solutions are starting to emerge. We are experiencing a realization, albeit a slow one, that no single technology is suitable for identifying and tracking things because different assets hold different values and each technology has its strengths and weaknesses relative to a given application.

As we’ve experienced with many other data-driven solutions, I expect this progression may eventually lead to RFID as a platform – with RFID modules and extensible software interfaces allowing for the integration of RIFD with other technologies. Purpose-built systems will incorporate passive sensors and computational systems will emerge. In certain applications, it is easy to imagine everyday physical objects with built-in RFID. If we’ve learned anything from the mobile device revolution it is that there is great promise when devices are able to connect with objects around us. Even more compelling is when these devices will be able to learn about our environment, provide contextual adaptation if necessary, and, connect those objects to the broader Internet and business systems.

There is no doubt that over the next decade, RFID systems will become an integral part of the consumer and business experience. The convergence of wireless technologies will be augmented by RFID systems. The development of passive RFID as part of this platform will be driven by the potential to measure, report and monetize a growing number of transactions in the physical world.

Similar to the mobile phone, the widespread integration of GPS into today’s commercial and consumer positioning solutions, and the adoption of this thing called the Internet, RFID is ready to transform markets. Only time will tell the scale and impact RFID will have, but I for one, bet it will be a big one.

RFID Boosts Fan Loyalty

Being a sports fan, I find myself going from one end of the pendulum to the other as far as being totally enamored with my team, to giving up hope and not wanting to hear their name until the next season. But, I will admit I could never change allegiances, no matter how disillusioned I may feel at certain times.

Even though season tickets and attending sporting events are probably the last thing people would give up in an economy when tightening belts is a way of life, team franchises must still recognize that times are tough and tickets and concessions aren’t cheap. They need to figure out ways to keep fans coming back, especially if they’re not winning.

Having exhibited technology savvy in the past, the Tampa Bay Lightning has recognized the business benefits of RFID. They have embedded RFID tags in about 10,000 season ticket holder jerseys. Why? To help drive ticket sales and team loyalty.

Season ticket holders will each receive the new team jersey with an RFID tag embedded into it. As the tags are scanned by one of the 250 readers installed into the Quest terminals throughout the arena, at concession stands, and in the retail stores and kiosks, they are offered discounts on food, beverages and team merchandise. And if you’re watching the game on TV, you can bet you’ll see a lot more Lightning jerseys in the crowd. Since embarking on this latest project, the Lightning franchise has seen a noticible increase in demand for season tickets.

We’ve seen this before. In a previous blog post, we experimented with RFID and social networks to build brand loyalty. The results showed so much promise that we feel this combination will soon take off in business. The Boston Celtics have recently used social media to convert Facebook fans into ticket holders. Mark my words, it won’t be long before the Celts see the promise of RFID with social networking to boost ticket sales.

For insight into how others are using RFID to build brand loyalty, download our case study: Building Brand Loyalty and Reach through RFID and Social Media.

The 4 Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and RFID

The next time you walk through the office, take a count of how many of those blue recycling bins you see until you reach your destination. Chances are, you’ll be running out of fingers and toes before you reach the other side of the building. The reason I point this out is because of the three proverbial legs of the recycling stool – reduce and reuse being the others – recycling is by far the most popular and easiest to implement. This holds true across office environments and the shipping world.

While there have been some interesting developments on the reduction front in recent years with companies finding new and innovative ways to make packaging smaller, reusable packaging has been an area that has evaded progress; until now anyway. During Pack Expo Las Vegas 2011, several prominent consumer brands, including the likes of Coca-Cola, Ghirardelli Chocolate and Alpha Baking, presented case studies on the topic of reusable packaging.

There had been a lot of talk in the past about implementing RFID into packaging, yet the cost continued to be an inhibitor. However, what is gaining steam in the shipping world is the use of RFID tags in reusable assets such as trays, crates and pallets where there is cost incentive for companies to find and reuse the shipping assets.

In the case of Alpha Baking, they have introduced a test program where they have implemented RFID tags in 8% of their estimated 350,000 reusable trays. The company uses RFID readers to obtain valuable data that helps improve shipping processes and prevent losses of these reusable assets. You may recall the blog we did on container tracking to prevent fraud. Now RFID brings about another benefit to the distribution market – enabling sustainability.

The key to making sustainable packaging successful is to have all three elements working effectively. If one of those areas is neglected, it has a negative impact on the entire process. One could easily make the case that reusable packaging is the most important of the three and yet perhaps the hardest to implement. RFID allows companies to track these important assets, saving them money and greatly reducing the number of units needed, and ultimately discarded. We all know that creating waste is counter to the philosophy of three Rs. Four Rs gets us even closer to the sustainability goal.

Greening the Data Center with RFID

By now you’ve probably figured out that we’re on a mission to reshape the way people think about RFID. “Efficient use of energy in the data center” is not the first thing most people would think of when they think of RFID. However, with the 1.8 zettabytes of data we are on pace to generate and consume as a society in 2011 (forecasted by IDC) RFID must fit in somewhere! What’s more, is data centers around the world are expected to use 19 percent more energy in the coming 12 months and more than one-third of companies expect at least one of their data centers to run out of power, cooling or space sometime within the next year. That’s a big problem to have. So what’s the answer?

There needs to be a way to manage the consequences that come along with the advent of Big Data. Not only are large amounts of data hard to manage, but it is also a costly operation. Many organizations are turning to cloud computing services to reduce their reliance on internal servers, which also contribute to lower energy consumption. But is that the only option? In a recent post, I discussed how the use of RFID will generate lots of new data. What if I told you the use of RFID can also be used to drive efficiencies into the data center infrastructure?

Russell Klein, Aberdeen Group analyst noted in a recent eWeek article that businesses large and small should be concerned with controlling data center costs, including energy consumption. One of the ways he suggested organizations do so is with RFID, which can be used to monitor conditions, such as temperature and air pressure. RFID provides real-time data streams to feed the analytics engine, a function other sophisticated infrastructure management platforms lack. As organizations look for more energy efficient IT operations that save money and build better infrastructure, it is likely that RFID will become a frontrunner.

RFID at Work in the Data Center

Implementing RFID in the data center is a form of asset management, but maybe not the way you currently think of asset management. For example, sensor modules with temperature probes can be wired to RFID tags. The modules are then attached to racks in data centers, where the probes measure the temperature of various devices and use RFID to transmit the data to a reader. The reader receives the temperature data and sends it along to the software residing on a dedicated server. The data is then used to regulate temperature controls in real-time to conserve energy, ultimately reducing the cost to run a data center.

The cost-effectiveness and ease of RFID in this type of implementation allowed the Franchise Tax Board in Sacramento California to reduce the consumption of energy in the agency’s data center by 75 percent, also saving them more than $40,000 a year. Due to the successful results, the state continues to receive funding for the project from the U.S. Department of Energy.

What other ways can we use RFID to create a greener environment?

The Illusion of Declining Account Takeover Attempts

In a recent Bank Info Security article, Account Takeover: Better or Worse?, Tracy Kitten interviews Doug Johnson, Vice President of Risk Management Policy for the American Bankers Association to get his expert opinion on the state of account takeovers and identity theft.

ACH fraud may be defined as many different fraud types including account takeover and payments fraud. Because there are no statistics on the total ACH losses for 2011, there may be the illusion that losses are down. In my opinion, the trend may seem that ACH fraud is decreasing due to tighter controls, but when I speak with industry colleagues, I tend to hear the opposite.

Dude, Where’s My Car? RFID Knows.

Imagine this scenario for a minute. You’ve got a couple of hours between meetings and have to run an important errand outside the city limits. No problem you say, I’ll login to my Zipcar account, reserve a car for an hour or so and be on my way. You get the confirmation email letting you know that your car is parked somewhere between #100 – #500 Center St. As it turns out, a lot of cars are parked in this location, and did I mention that it’s raining? So much for a simple transaction and convenience, you’ve just wasted 30 minutes of your available time trying to locate your car and will now be hard pressed to complete your errand in time to be back in the office for your next meeting.

Hello GPS and RFID

Now most people are familiar with GPS technology and have probably used one of these devices at some point in order to navigate an unfamiliar route and get to their destination. However, as illustrated in the example above, a GPS doesn’t help all that much if you can’t find your car. Or can it? A new car service known as Car2go which launched in the summer of 2010 in Austin TX, has found a way to implement GPS and RFID technology to help its customers instantly locate and gain access to their cars.

Here’s How it Works

Using an iPad app, the GPS device in the car points you to the precise location of the car you have reserved. No more searching general locations and wandering up and down the streets or through parking lots. Once you have arrived at your car, RFID makes things really easy. Simply tap your membership card on the windshield and the doors open. The membership card contains the RFID tag and the windshield contains an embedded RFID reader. Now you can grab the keys from the glove box, punch in some numbers on the keypad and you are on your way.

This just another example of how companies are finding ways to incorporate RFID technology into every day functions to make our lives easier. It’s no longer a technology that is reserved to address big business issues related to supply chains and distribution channels, or to make possible game-changing hospital procedures. Keep following along as we reshape the way you think about RFID.

Flower Shop Fraud

Committing bank fraud is easy when you have help on the inside. That’s what the prosecutors in the UK think happened in a $2m fraud scheme involving high net worth accounts. Between July and September 2008, a gang lead by Neil Wynne targeted Barclays Bank branches throughout the middle of England. Prosecutors believe that the gang had help from a bank employee as they had an uncanny knack for picking the best accounts to target. They also had no problem overcoming the bank’s security procedures. They just can’t prove that an employee was involved – at least not yet.

Here’s the scheme… With a fake passport in hand, one member of the gang pretended to be the owner of an existing, well-funded, Barclay’s Bank account. A second member of the gang posed as the accountholder’s partner.

Once the new account was opened, the gang proceeded to ...

RFID, Big Data and Retail

The holiday retail sales season by most accounts was characterized as volatile – with huge surges at the start and end of the season, and big dips in the middle. That’s obviously good and bad for retailers. How to smooth out the peaks and valleys surely will be discussed at the National Retail Federation’s “Big Show” this month.

This also gives us an opportunity to illustrate how an industry can think differently about RFID to help address this problem. As we asserted in our 2012 prediction that data and apps will rule RFID for the next 10 years, when companies hear the term “RFID”, they shouldn’t be thinking about readers and tags, but rather about processes. Here’s how it can be done within retail.

Real-time Data, Real-time Decisions

The age-old challenge in retail is how to maximize razor-thin margins. The newer challenge is sustaining increased sales in brick-and-mortar stores. Technology is essential, but it has more of an advantage for online retail.

A key to optimizing sales and margins is making near real-time decisions about merchandising, assortments and promotions. It’s easier to do this on the web because of data available from such things as what items people are clicking on, search queries, etc. Retailers can change what gets promoted on the fly with this information.

But how can this happen in physical stores? Point-of-sales systems provide data as to what people buy in the store. This has been where innovations in terms of data warehousing and analytics have come. There’s a lot of consumer behavior that takes place before the check-out though, and data from this activity can help make even faster decisions about assortment and promotions on the floor.

There are project-level RFID implementations in retail that we have highlighted here that can be broadened to make a process-level impact. For example, last month we wrote about how a department store in Japan is the first to use RFID-based interactive hangers that trigger a display of a model wearing a garment that a customer selects off a rack. The idea is to make the item more appealing at the point of interest.

Those hangers could do a lot more for a retailer, however. The mere fact that someone picked the item off the rack shows an initial level of interest, which can be captured as a new set of data; like clicking on an item online. If a person takes it to the fitting room to try it on, where there is another RFID reader, the system can capture this as additional data related to the level of interest in an item. If the item is left in the fitting room, the retailer can know this immediately, as well as if the item is taken from the fitting room to the check-out counter.

This is as valuable as the data that can be mined from web site clicks and searches and allow in-store managers to change assortments and displays much more quickly than before.

Processes and Solutions

When we say that we should reshape the way we think about RFID, we mean that we should not fixate on the need to prove the technology, but rather think about ALL of the processes that can be improved with the availability of RFID data. As the example above is intended to illustrate, retailers should think about how they can get data about shoppers’ behavior from the moment they walk in a store and the kind of analysis they can do to optimize processes accordingly.

Specific processes can be gleaned with the help of McKinsey’s recent Big Data report, which looks at retail as one of the industries where more value can be created from new data sources like RFID systems. These include in-store behavior analysis, customer micro-segmentation, assortment optimization and placement and design optimization.

Beyond the process identification, retailers can benefit from the availability of full RFID solutions that help them incorporate data generated from RFID systems with the data warehousing, analytics and mostly home-grown software applications used to manage operations.

We’ll continue our series of posts about how other industries can think about leveraging RFID data by looking more closely on healthcare and the in-transit markets. In the meantime, what are some other ways retailers can use RFID to enhance existing processes?

What if RFID was Never Invented? A ThingMagic Top Ten

You know you are in the height of the political season when you turn on the Late Show with David Letterman and see all of the candidates lining up to give their top 10 lists. While these attempts to connect with the American people normally fall flat, it did get us thinking about our own Letterman style top ten and what fun and interesting uses of the technology we’d present if given the opportunity to visit the show.

So without further delay, we present to you our Top Ten things to consider if RFID had never been invented:

10. The lines would be a lot longer during our coffee runs: Cup o’ Joe to Go

9. All of the crazy story lines in crime dramas might actually happen: RFID and The CSI Effect

8. We couldn’t install “LoJack” in our cactuses: Cactus Chips

7. We’d all be subject to search and seizure at border crossings: RFID for Border Security

6. It would mean counting bees the old fashioned way: RFID for Counting Bees. Really?

5. Fox could theoretically run ‘Prison Break’ forever: RFID Put Behind Bars

4. The “Where’s Waldo” effect would run rampant in salvage yards: The New Junkyard Dog

3. There would be a lot more false pulls in the milking business: Milkin’ It with RFID

2. Really bad golf would still be in play this season: Find It, Play It – With RFID

And the number one consideration if RFID had never been invented is…

1. Unauthorized use of electroshock weapons would surely climb: Don’t Lose Your Taser Bro

Maybe we’ll never get the chance to join Dave on the show, but hopefully we’ve given you a few interesting thoughts about the impact RFID continues to have on all walks of life.

For more, check out our ever popular list of 100 Uses of RFID!

UHF is the Magic Pill for RFID in Healthcare

As we look to 2012, our first major event is HIMSS and we can’t wait. The healthcare market has been at the forefront of RFID adoption, discovering a plethora of ways in which the technology can streamline operations, reduce human error and make the patient experience exponentially better.

This year HIMSS (February 20-24, Venetian Sands Expo Center, Las Vegas) will host the Intelligent Hospital Pavilion in which it will showcase a variety of technologies that work together to deliver real-time patient information to the mobile devices and tablets of physicians and hospital staff (Visit ThingMagic in KIOSK #16). Scenarios from the OR, ICU and ED and will demonstrate how information is coordinated from diverse patient care environments with Near Field Communications (NFC), RFID, RTLS (real time locating systems), sensors and wireless technologies.

RFID has proven its worth in healthcare and continues to improve procedures and enhance environments from tracking expiration dates on medication, to personalizing the experience for cancer patients, to managing inventory of critical dose medication, to helping surgeons locate tumors.

According to a Frost & Sullivan report, RFID: Unlocking Opportunities in the Healthcare Vertical from July 2011, “The RFID market is expected to witness a significant increase in revenues by 2017, due to its acceptability, capability, and credibility. It has taken an affirmative position in the healthcare sector owing to substantial cost savings and convenience.”

RFID’s Success in Healthcare Can Be Attributed to Passive UHF RFID

Barcodes have long been used in the hospital supply chain for tracking products, supplies and inventory control. By using barcodes on forms, wrist bands and records, healthcare providers have driven efficiencies into the patient registration process.

Passive UHF RFID can enhance or replace many supply chain management, patient registration, patient safety, clinical care, and billing workflows that currently use barcodes. While both barcodes and RFID can be used for these activities, Passive UHF RFID is more effective due to the additional automation and cost saving opportunities it delivers. Simply put, Passive UHF RFID enables the rapid and precise measurement of almost every operation in the healthcare setting - from counting and verifying the number of items in each surgical tray to analyzing the slightest body movement.

Passive UHF RFID allows tags to be read from far away so that readers can be deployed in a variety of ways including permanent installations wired to the existing hospital Ethernet network, within strategically located “portals,” and integrated into mobile and stationary devices like carts and cabinets. This flexibility is complemented by the wide variety of Passive RFID tags that can be affixed to or integrated into consumable inventory, handheld surgical tools, patient wristbands, photo ID badges, and many other items.

Put simply, Passive RFID is the most economical way to measure a large number of parameters in healthcare setting, enabling innovative patient-centric applications that would otherwise not be implemented

Proven Uses of Passive UHF RFID Solutions Include:

Departmental Loss Prevention – proven to deliver an ROI in a short period of time by saving high value assets from being mistakenly discarded.

Asset Tracking – identifies the location and travel patterns of many types of valuable assets in real-time, resulting in reduced product loss, reduced capital equipment purchases & leases, and enhanced patient services.

Patient/Staff Tracking – tracks the travel patterns of staff, patients and personnel in real-time for access control, improved patient & staff workflows, reduced wait times, and integration into anti-abduction, wander prevention, and hand hygiene solutions.

We’re sure to see these and other uses in action at the Intelligent Hospital Pavilion at HIMSS. For more examples of ThingMagic in Healthcare, please download the following case studies:

Disney Family Cancer Center Case Study: The Roy and Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center Implements Innovative RFID Solution to Enhance Patient Experience and Increase Efficiency

XECAN Oncology Clinic Case Study: Eliminating Wrong Patient and Wrong Treatment Errors with RFID

Hopefully what happens in Vegas, doesn’t stay in Vegas!

Ready! Set! Hut! Hut! RFID?

Football is by far the most popular sport in the United States with much of its success being credited to its sheer brutality and gladiator mentality. Let’s face it; if you watch football on TV, you are likely drawn in by the bone crushing hits.

If you pay attention to the sports scene at all, you undoubtedly have been hearing a lot of discussion around player safety, specifically, the issue of concussions. What was once referred to as “getting your bell rung” has now been more appropriately diagnosed as a concussion, and has sparked spirited debate over player safety and the ramifications of multiple concussions on a player’s long-term health.

The issue of concussions was largely ignored in contact sports such as football and hockey until the middle of the last decade when former Ivy League football player and former WWE wrestler Chris Nowinski wrote a critically acclaimed book called: Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis, which was published in 2006. This book and his subsequent research and affiliation with the Boston University School of Medicine has shown a bright light on the issue of sports based concussions.

So what does Football have to do with RFID?

I’m glad you asked.

Treehouse Labs, a product development firm based in Austin, TX recently announced that they will soon be testing a prototype along with Shockwave Impact Systems of Chicago that allows them to install a sensing system inside of football helmets in order to alert coaches and medical personnel when a player experiences an impact great enough to cause a concussion. Using RFID, the data is transmitted to a web-based server that can be accessed via smartphones. The transmitters are expected to have a range of approximately 2.5 miles.

These developments have the potential to open up a whole new arena for RFID technology. In addition to football, contact sports such as hockey and lacrosse would seem a natural progression. Other sports such as auto and motorcycle racing and cycling could benefit as well; information gathered from these sensors could assist medical personnel in diagnosing head injuries quicker and take the appropriate steps for treatment.

These are just the latest examples of how RFID is finding its way into our everyday experiences and improving the quality of our daily lives.

2011 Fraud Trends – 3 Key Takeaways

At year’s end, I like to take a step back and assess the main fraud trends I’ve seen and heard when speaking with our customers. Not only have we seen a lot of movement in the ACH area due to the FFIEC Supplement released this year, but there also have been some major events in the news this year that have driven action in fraud prevention measures overall. There are a few trends, in particular, that stand out to me more than others.

1. Internal Fraud is Here to Stay: The interest in Internal Fraud continues to be high, and without a proactive monitoring system in place, banks are at higher risk of being exposed to theft from their own employees. Some of the more common fraud strategies in Internal Fraud include ...

Prediction: Data and Apps Rule RFID For The Next 10 Years

“If history is any indication, we should assume that any technology that is going to have a significant impact over the next 10 years is already 10 years old!”

-- Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences

It amazes me each year. It seems like I blink and all of a sudden I see the torrent of predictions coming at me from all directions. Where did the year go?

Indeed, it was another year of fast-paced change in the RFID market. The end of the year is always a good time to take a step back and consider what the next year will hold. I personally find it fun to make predictions. Except, instead of predicting the next year, I’m going to channel Bill Buxton and his quote referenced above and issue somewhat of a challenge for the next 10 years.

It’s Time to Reshape the Way We Think About RFID

During the last 10 years (and even going back 40 years since the first passive radio transponder with memory was patented in 1970), RFID hardware and software providers have continued to innovate and collaborate at a notable clip. RFID readers have evolved to include a wide variety of purpose-built form factors, and embedded RFID modules are being used to enable many stationary and mobile devices with the auto-identification technology.

In fact, the technology itself has matured to a point where it is no longer a barrier to entry for most markets and applications. What’s more, businesses across all industries have a great number of well documented end user case studies and best practices to help them with their ROI analysis.

So now what?

End customer organizations of all sizes have learned where and when it makes the most sense to apply RFID to their business processes. RFID vendors and solution providers have survived the technology maturation process. Now it’s time to think beyond RFID of the past 10 years and toward the next wave of innovation.

Big Data, Meet RFID

We should think beyond the underlying technology – and toward the value of RFID data, emerging methods of data access and analysis, and about the many innovative enterprise and consumer applications that can be enabled with this data.

We should think beyond one-size-fits-all readers – and toward the wide variety of fixed-position and embedded RFID reader form factors that can support a great number of unbelievably diverse applications.

We should think beyond siloed deployments of RFID – and toward the hardware, software and data becoming an integrated element of the enterprise.

We should think beyond the singular technology of RFID – and toward the combination of RFID and other technologies like GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

As we’ve experienced with many other data-driven solutions, this progression will lead to RFID as a data platform – with RFID modules and extensible software interfaces allowing for the integration of RFID with other technologies. Even more compelling is when these devices will be able to learn about our environment, provide contextual adaptation if necessary, and, connect those objects to the broader Internet and business systems.

Thought about in this way, RFID becomes much more valuable in the context of “big data” and how it is “the next frontier of innovation”, as McKinsey states earlier this year in its report Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity. In fact, it cites the Internet of Things as a major contributing factor to the explosion of data.

Consistent with Bill Buxton’s view, big data is not new. If you look at the amount of information Google deals with as an example, it’s been around for at least 10 years. But as more objects get connected to the network, the idea of “big” data as we’ve known it so far will seem quaint (a view that McKinsey shares).

The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.

Along with the torrent of data RFID platforms will produce come challenges in dealing with the data; first and foremost the need to think at a business process level about how this data can be used to create more organizational value in the form of increased revenue, cost savings and profits.

So, along with the challenge to think about RFID from a data vs. technology perspective comes the need for the industry to provide more end-to-end-solutions. The market needs to move fast because companies already are thinking at this level, in particular in the in-transit, retail and healthcare markets - which we’ll examine in future posts.

In the meantime, what do think? What are the challenges you see ahead for the industry? I’d love to discuss in the comments and in future posts.

Will NRF’s ‘The Big Show’ Be a Good Barometer of RFID in Retail?

Already in its 101^st year, the National Retail Federation (NRF) is gearing up for its Annual Convention & EXPO in New York next month. It looks like there is a lot of excitement in store for us (no pun intended) including a keynote speech from Bill Clinton!

Aside from a former U.S. President being in attendance, digital retail and mobility are dominating the buzz this year. This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise because retailers are marketing to the consumer in ways that align with their behaviors – which is largely dominated by using mobile devices to consume digital information.

According to Susan Newman, NRF’s Senior Vice President of Conferences, “Right now, it’s all about how you reach customers, engage with them, and help them engage with you.”

If you walk into any mall or store, or even just observe people walking down the street, EVERYONE is carrying a mobile device. If that’s an accurate representation of the consumer market today, retailers must recognize that they can reach a very large portion of their target audience via digital media and the smart phone. As a proof point to that theory, Shop.org’s First Look Track at NRF will be two days that focus on all things digital, related to topics such as The Future Shopper and Buying Behaviors.

A while back we experimented with mobility and social media, having RFID play the integral role. We determined that RFID + Social Media = Reach. Meaning that by adding the two together, it was easier and more effective to reach the intended audience, customize to their preferences and build brand loyalty. How can RFID help get us closer to that Holy Grail (in a simple, easy way) in retail?

One way to get to get a better understanding of your customers’ preferences is through item-level tagging. It may actually be on its way to being considered a best practice in retail. The Voluntary Inter-industry Commerce Solutions (VICS) Association started the VICS Item-Level RFID Initiative for that very purpose. Its goal is to foster innovation, improve business processes and enhance consumer experiences by developing business applications and best practices around standards-based RFID. This is the kind of support the industry needs to effectively sell, and sell in such a way that is embraced by consumers. Using mobile devices and digital/social media will undoubtedly be widely accepted because it aligns with their current behavior.

We can’t wait to see some of these session tracks at NRF to learn more. Congratulations, NRF on 101 years and a sold out expo floor!

Holiday Gift Idea: Game On RFID!

Kids are harder to please come holiday time every year. The more that technology goes into toys, the more kids expect from them. The Wii and Xbox Kinect have set the bar high for the use of wireless technology in game play. Action figures are downright boring if they don’t make wondrous sounds. They need RFID to really make them interesting.

That reality is here with one of the hottest gifts for the 2011 holiday season. Activision, the company that brought the “Guitar Hero” franchise to life, has introduced Skylanders, the latest innovation in gaming technology. Through the use of plastic action figures that act as thumb drives for storing data, users are able to connect wirelessly to a video game system with each of the figures serving as an independent wireless storage device.

The action figures have RFID chips that are read by the “Portal of Power” on which they are placed. This allows users to play with the figures on one gaming system and transport them to other locations and different systems without losing any of the stored data so they can pick up at the point they left off. For example, a gamer could start off a skylander mission on his PlayStation 3 and complete the adventure on a Wii system without any loss of status or interruption of game play. This has never been possible before.

It is being speculated in the gaming industry that if the Skylander franchise takes off as expected, it will lead to other game manufactures such as Nintendo with its popular Mario brand to begin producing its own version. This is incredibly exciting news for the makers of RFID technology as gaming is one of the fastest growing industries in existence. If anyone has any doubts to this, try finding a shopping plaza these days that doesn’t have a GameStop store.

As RFID technology continues to become more a part of our daily lives it stands to reason that we will see even more breakthroughs in the areas of entertainment in the years to come. And with the consumer of this technology being much more tech savvy than previous generations, companies are going to be forced to push the envelope of innovation in order to capture market share.

This is good news for consumers and RFID alike.

Image credit: Activision Publishing, Inc.

Year-End Transaction Volume

Depending on which news report you read, sales on “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” were considerably higher than last year. What does that mean for the bank fraud investigator? More transactions to wade through! Right about now, bank fraud departments around the United States are working overtime combing through billions of transactions. Unfortunately, when volume increases, so too does the volume of fraud attempts.

When transaction volumes spike, any weaknesses in a bank’s fraud detection landscape are often magnified. That’s what the fraudster wants. The more stress the bank’s fraud department is under, the more likely it will be that fraud transactions will slip through.

You can’t do that much to control the volume, but you can capture the lessons learned when you and your team are pushed to the breaking point. Consider the following questions ...

The Value of Integration and Collaboration

I recently attended part of the Orbograph user group meeting where I participated in a panel discussing the value in combining forces in the fight against fraud. The panel was moderated by Jodi Pratt, well known in fraud-fighting circles. Speaking with me on the panel was Carl Bortol of Data Support Systems. Both Carl and I represent companies that have partnerships with Orbograph. On the panel, we discussed two levels of working together, integration and collaboration.

Integration
This level focuses on integrating the fraud detection system into the rest of the bank’s systems in an operational sense. This includes core systems like DDA and CIS, and transaction processing systems like Exceptions...

Raising the Stakes for Internal Fraud

Earlier this week, Bank Info Security released an article on the Computershare civil suit against a former employee for stealing company information and shareholder data. The piece discusses the potential impact such a suit might have on the financial services industry, and I was able to contribute my two cents about the matter.

My opinion is, that in the case of data breaches and insider fraud, legal action against employees is historically rare. Most of the time these incidents are handled as internal matters; the exceptions have only been the worst or largest breaches and fraud schemes.

But, we do see a shift in how firms are approaching internal fraud. A handful of high profile internal data breaches and fraud cases (e.g., SocGen, UBS, Madoff ...

Customer Experience: Where Content, Commerce & Community Collide

Three major components of today’s customer experience management efforts are the three “C”‘s: Content, Community and Commerce. It goes without saying that all three are important for success in today’s world of online commerce but all too many implementations are ineffective because they ignore an unspoken, and perhaps the most important “C”, the Convergence of each of these key areas. | View post »

Can We Do Better?

With the new year here, I figured it was a good time to step back and take stock of our progress – as an industry – in the ongoing battle against fraud. A frank assessment: we could be doing a lot better.

Sure, there are always improvements that can be made to the organizations, processes and technologies that must come together to solve a complex issue like fraud management. But I think the more important barriers our industry faces are more fundamental and structural in nature. Specifically, I see the following:

The Boiling Frog
Our industry’s slow reaction to the growing, morphing fraud problem makes me think of the boiling frog phenomenon. If you haven’t heard of it ...

“Getting it Right” at the NACHA Mega Meeting

Last week, ACH payments and fraud prevention professionals attended the NACHA Council Mega Meeting held on the waterfront in Boston, MA. In the sessions related to quicker payment processing, the overall sentiment was that banks need to do a better job of monitoring to manage the increased exposure. Two of the hottest topics were Expedited Processing and Settlement and, of course, the new supplement to the 2005 FFIEC Guidance.

Expedited Processing and Settlement (EPS): As anyone who is involved in ACH payments knows, NACHA is proposing a new payment option called EPS, which would allow ...

Saving Trees, One SAR e-Filing at a Time

In September, FinCEN released for comment a proposal to make electronic filing of SARs mandatory as of June 30, 2012. FinCEN’s e-filing system has been available since October 2002, and about 85% of BSA reports are currently filed electronically.

If you were unaware of this...

Letter from Client Services

It’s now been three months since I joined Memento, and I want to take the opportunity to say hello, communicate some of the exciting changes which are taking place, and offer my perspective on what you can expect to see from us going forward.

Perhaps I should start with what hasn’t changed. What hasn’t changed is Memento’s commitment to, and passion for, helping its customers detect, prevent and manage fraud. This dedication spans the products we build, the consulting services we deliver, and the ongoing relationships we develop. Our goal is to help you successfully deal with your ever-changing fraud-related challenges, and ultimately enable you to reduce losses and exposure to risk.

What has changed is how we accomplish this. For starters, we recently ...

Video Search and Discovery and the Consumer’s Love for Entertainment

Ben Weinberger

CEO & Co-Founder

Posted by ben on Oct 6th, 2011 09:02 AM

Today’s video viewers have a multiplicity of options for watching their favorite shows and movies. Pay-TV, video on demand, blu-ray and online streaming just to name a few. And there is proof – from viewers and content owners – that viewers are taking advantage of this explosion of video options. Just read the following:

.406 Ventures LiveFeed

Veracode’s Chris Wysopal Appointed to Black Hat’s Content Review Panel

RuggedCom Vulnerabilities and You: Why SCADA Security Matters

Twitter Claims a Victim: Francesca’s Holdings Fires CFO

The State Attorney General - A New Sheriff in Town

Interview with Dan Guido at SOURCE Boston 2012 – Part 2

Mobile in Business: Protecting Your Company and Its Employees

What is Data Integrity? Learn How to Ensure Database Data Integrity via Checks, Tests, & Best Practices

Top eCommerce Stories 5/7/2012 to 5/11/2012

Weekly News Roundup

Massive Attack on Natural Gas Infrastructure is Likely Advance Guard

Interview with Dan Guido at SOURCE Boston 2012 – Part I

The Security Performance Tax Refund

Data Mining A Mountain of Zero Day Vulnerabilities – Webinar Q&A

FileVault: Another Hit to Apple’s Security

Mobile Shopping Spring Conference Takeaways

Cybersecurity Risks in Public Companies Infographic

RFID Garment Tracking at Disney

Top Weekly eCommerce Stories from 4/30 to 5/4

CISPA: How Information Sharing Could Actually Help

Weekly News Roundup

Social Phishing: The Threat of Facebook Hacks and Twitter Spam

Gamification on a Grand Scale

Reducing Food Waste with RFID

Software Security: A Chief Financial Officer’s Perspective

A Brief Field Guide to Post-UDID Unique IDs on iOS

Catch Them If You Can

Improving Healthcare Experience with Social Media

Survey Rates Anonymous Top Threat: Here’s 4 Reasons Why Anonymous Won’t Hack You [INFOGRAPHIC]

Toll Roads and Car Management Improve with RFID

FIPS Compliance May Actually Make OpenSSL Less Secure

Review: Roadmap to Revenue

Can RFID Bring Manufacturing Back to the U.S?

Impatient America: Response Time in the Era of Immediacy

Business at the Speed of RFID

Google Glass: A Glimpse Into The Internet of Things?

Fighting Fraud in Canada

Spring Cleaning Your Fraud Scenarios

More Takeaways from the BAI Conference

Notes from Memento's Michael Wlodyka, Fraud Consultant, and Matt Doremus, Sr. Solutions Architect

RFID is Part of the DNA

Brick and Mortar Renaissance Webinar by Peter Sheldon; A Review Part 2

Notes from 2012 BAI Payments Connect

Out with Dewey Decimal, In with RFID

Brick and Mortar Renaissance Webinar by Peter Sheldon (Forrester); A Review Part 1

The ‘Cost of Doing Business’ Trap

RFID Revolutionizes the Electric Vehicle Industry

Where Does Your Food Come From? RFID Knows.

Ramnit, Facebook, and Password Management – Oh My!

Phish Sings RFID’s Praises

RFID - Stand up and Be Counted!

Hospitals Should Consider a Phased Approach to Deploying RFID

The Data Mining Debate

A Holistic Approach to Fraud and Risk

Reshaping the Way We Think about RFID

RFID Boosts Fan Loyalty

The 4 Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and RFID

Greening the Data Center with RFID

The Illusion of Declining Account Takeover Attempts

Dude, Where’s My Car? RFID Knows.

Flower Shop Fraud

RFID, Big Data and Retail

What if RFID was Never Invented? A ThingMagic Top Ten

UHF is the Magic Pill for RFID in Healthcare

Ready! Set! Hut! Hut! RFID?

2011 Fraud Trends – 3 Key Takeaways

Prediction: Data and Apps Rule RFID For The Next 10 Years

Will NRF’s ‘The Big Show’ Be a Good Barometer of RFID in Retail?

Holiday Gift Idea: Game On RFID!

Year-End Transaction Volume

The Value of Integration and Collaboration

Raising the Stakes for Internal Fraud

Customer Experience: Where Content, Commerce & Community Collide

Can We Do Better?

“Getting it Right” at the NACHA Mega Meeting

Saving Trees, One SAR e-Filing at a Time

Letter from Client Services

Video Search and Discovery and the Consumer’s Love for Entertainment

Getting in Shape for the Software Training Marathon

FFIEC Guidance 2011 – Where Do We Start?