I attended the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab's discussion of Biometric Technologies last night at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Bob McCashin, CEO of Identix, was the keynote speaker. He talked about Identix's business involving supplier fingerprint-based ID verification systems. Their business has taken off since September 11th -- particularly for airport identification checks of employees. He says there are over 700,000 airport employees who are in the process now of having their fingerprints screened.

Jim Bidzos, Vice Chairman of RSA Security and Chairman of VeriSign, moderated a panel discussion. In his opening remarks, Jim discussed his experience building a company in the encryption/data security space and how tough it is as an entrepreneur in a market space where significant infrastructure must be built.

On the panel were Marge Breya from Sun Microsystems who discussed the new Liberty Alliance started by Sun in July 2001 and which was publicly announced in late September. Liberty's members bring namespaces representing over 2 billion names.

Also on the panel were Martin Reynolds from the Gartner Group and Charles Hudson, a venture capitalist with the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture fund.

Interestingly, Charles commented that his venture fund hasn't invested in any biometric companies and that most of their energies to date have been focused on knowledge management companies.

There was a lot of discussion by the panel about the prospects for a national ID card but general agreement that it was unlikely to see the light of day. A general sense across the panel was that any widespread consumer usage of biometrics would probably be driven by the major credit card companies deciding to launch products based upon biometrics which could then also be used by other companies for other purposes.   3:51:31 PM     

An article by Judith Myerson on Web Services Architect compares the various architectures for web services.

"Based on initial findings and the current state of implementations, IBM's architecture is most acceptable. All architectures, however, will eventually come into one umbrella, as there is a risk that if companies go away and keep on building their own extensions to the Basic architecture stack, the promise of Web Services could be lost."

Also, here are some notes with highlights of last week's InfoWorld Next Generation Web Services conference. The poll results near the end of the summary are most interesting.

A great quote from James Gosling, Sun Microsystems:

"Democracies always work slower than dictatorships, and the human society decided a long time which form they preferred."

Conferenza also provides some highlights.

   2:19:55 PM     

I have what I like to think of as a pretty cool laptop: Sony SuperSlim. 850 MHz Pentium III, 384 MB of memory, Windows XP, 20 GB hard drive. (It also has a terrible fan noise but I've learned to live with it!)

I really pound on this machine. At times, the performance really sucks. It's not that the processor bogs down, it's always the result of the hard drive slowing things down.

Surely there must be a solution for power users like me? Why can't someone develop a more effective hard drive or insert a cool piece of new technology (remember bubble memory) in the storage hierarchy between main memory and the hard drive.

Billions of dollars await the solver of this problem!   8:59:40 AM     

Doc says "Blogging for me is mostly a matter of discovery and curiousity." I agree!    8:56:32 AM     

Mark calls it a "lovingly duct-taped power-contraption". That's close! I call it my secret weapon!   8:54:07 AM