The Smart Card Alliance honored its Industry Councils during the 2011 Smart Card Alliance Annual Conference, giving thanks for their contributions to the smart card industry. The SCA Industry Council contributes through collaborative work on white papers, best practices, webinars, conferences and more.

For their work, notably on the white paper “Getting to Meaningful Use and Beyond: How Smart Card Technology Can Support Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records,” the SCA awarded honors to: 

Entrust announced the availability of IdentityGuard , it’s newest Software Development Kit aimed to enable banks to deliver trusted mobile banking applications to customers. With support for iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Java it provides users the ability to work from all major platforms.

The Entrust IdentityGuard Mobile SDK enables advanced authentication in mobile applications. One example is banking information, which can now be secured using IdentityGuard without the end user having to enter a password on screen to secure the data.

The new tools will make it easier for developers to take advantage of easy to use tools and build on Entrust’s secure framework.  

Identive Group Inc. announced that it has acquired substantially all of the shares of stock of idOnDemand Inc., a provider of service-based identity credential provisioning and management. The transaction closed on May 2.

Privately-held idOnDemand is headquartered in Pleasanton, Calif. and maintains data centers in Santa Clara, Calif. and Canberra, Australia. Jason Hart, founder, chief executive officer and the majority shareholder of idOnDemand, will continue to manage the company as a business unit within Identive Group. 

Dell India is equipping its range of new Latitude E series laptops with integrated contactless smart card readers and biometric fingerprint scanners, according to Techcircle.in.

Dell’s integrated contactless reader is designed to enable employees to securely log into their laptop using their contactless employee ID cards. The biometric fingerprint scanner provides an additional level of security, ensuring that only authorized personnel can use the laptop. 

Eurosmart gathered at its Brussels headquarters to announce new members, underline 2010 key achievements, and deliver a vision for future developments. At the General Assembly, Eurosmart increased the final figure for shipments in Telecom market segment in 2010 to bring the total shipment of microcontroller based Smart Secure Devices above 5.5 billion in 2010.

Forecasts for 2011 predict the 6 billion bar will be crossed with major growth drivers including SIM shipments in India, Indonesia, China and Brazil. Also, worldwide EMV migration, in particular Latin America and Asia, along with multiple commercial NFC deployments happening worldwide contribute to this estimate. 

Smart phones are beginning to face the same problem computers continue to battle. Mobile data has exploded of late, and with that, the potential to lose sensitive information has become an ever increasing problem, according to research from Global Industry Analysts Inc.

End users can do their part by setting encryption and passwords locally or locking their devices. Other measures include carefully screening downloads. However, one can only do so much to protect their information. 

Verizon has earned the federal government’s Personal Identity Verification Interoperable certification for the company’s Identity Managed Service Offering. This certification, issued by the Federal PKI Policy Authority, provides assurance that identity services are helping to improve security, reduce identity fraud and protect the privacy of credentialed users and their organizations.

Verizon’s cloud-based identity offering enables federal agencies and organizations that work with the federal government to create, issue and manage digital identity credentials for workers and contractors, via Verizon’s identity services platform.