Last night we had a small but good November's Mobile Monday Austin event. The topic was “The role of Smartcards in Mobility”. For speakers we had the pleasure to have Dan Cunningham, president and CEO of Raak Technologies and William Muscato, Marketing Manager at Axalto
(used to be Schlumberger). The session was very interactive and informative.

Smartcards are a very pervasive technology. Deployed by the millions and
millions, yet it goes pretty much unnoticed. You can find smartcards in cellphones, as SIM cards, where it is used to store subscriber information and other information such as contacts and even applications. And you can find smartcards in your wallet embedded in credit cards, and in the future we will see
our digital identities (certificates) stored in these type of cards as well. Some smartcards are smart, and can store applications such as
Java Card applets, while other smartcards are not as smart, and are used mainly for storage. Recently Java Card support for contact-less smartcards was announced.

Dan presented smartcards from the security perspective and he introduced all the basic concepts and terminology. Dan (and myself) also touched on SATSA for Java ME, the API that will allow Java ME applications (such as MIDlets) have full access to smartcards, SIM cards and Java Card applets, as well as to crypto functionality. William introduced smartcards from the SIM (and operator) perspective where he presented real business cases in the U.S. and abroad, statistics and use cases; he also showed a SIM card commercial in Malaysia that really shows how other countries see smartcards — a very open-minded mentality when it comes to SIM cards, as opposed to the U.S. where SIM cards are pretty much off-limits unless you have the operator's blessing.

You can find Dan's presentation here, and William's presentation [here] (sorry I will post William's presentation when I get a softcopy).

I have written a number of articles on Java Card and SATSA that you can read to learn more about these technologies —
you can find these via my website.

Carlo Longino of MobHappy also wrote about last night's MoMo Austin event.

ceo