Author Archives: bredemarket

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Daugman

Back in July 2023 I wrote a post about irises that referred to the last name “Daugman” a lot. With reason. The following paragraphs are adapted from that post.

Why use irises rather than, say, fingerprints and faces? The best person to answer this is John Daugman. (At this point several of you are intoning, “John Daugman.” With reason. He’s the inventor of iris recognition.)

Here’s an excerpt from John Daugman’s 2004 paper on iris recognition:

(I)ris patterns become interesting as an alternative approach to reliable visual recognition of persons when imaging can be done at distances of less than a meter, and especially when there is a need to search very large databases without incurring any false matches despite a huge number of possibilities. Although small (11 mm) and sometimes problematic to image, the iris has the great mathematical advantage that its pattern variability among different persons is enormous.

Daugman, John, “How Iris Recognition Works.” IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 14, NO. 1, JANUARY 2004. Quoted from page 21. (PDF)

Or in non-scientific speak, one benefit of iris recognition is that you know it is accurate, even when submitting a pair of irises in a one-to-many search against a huge database.

Daugman died the year after I wrote my 2023 post, but his biography and accomplishments are listed here.

Daugman received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University and taught there before joining Cambridge University, where he was Professor of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. He also held chairs at universities in Europe and Japan. His honors included the Information Technology Award of the British Computer Society, and the OBE, Order of the British Empire.

When Companies Can’t Target Prospects Under Age 16

If you’re on a platform such as Facebook, you sometimes receive advertisements that are VERY specific. Such as, “This is the perfect drink holder for California white males over the age of 50!” It’s almost as if they know everything about you…because they do.

Unless you implement privacy restrictions and don’t allow platform advertisers to reference your personal information.

Of course, if the advertiser isn’t able to narrowcast directly to you, the advertiser will broadcast to everybody.

And Facebook will start showing you advertisements in Chinese.

Qiaobi.

And if you complain to Facebook and ask why you’re seeing Chinese ads, Facebook will simply reply, “We are prohibited from using your personal information. Since there are a billion Chinese, we take a guess that you’re Chinese and show you those ads.”

Which brings us to age and social media.

The Under 16s Are Blocklisted

Back when Marky Mark created The Facebook, he initially targeted college-age users. But as time went on, Facebook and its competitors started aiming for younger ages.

This makes sense. Advertisers want to target consumers who are suspectible to changing their minds and are not set in their ways. So while a super kewl soft drink manufacturer isn’t going to target me, it is going to target 18 year olds…and 16 year olds…and 14 year olds…and 12 year olds.

A recent DKC report stated that 42% of all household spending is influenced by 8- to 14-year-olds, and that this age group is DIRECTLY spending over $100 billion per year.

So you can bet that advertisers are clamoring to purchase ad time on Facebook, TikTok, and the other social media services to get a pipeline to the brains of these 8 to 14 year olds…whoops, 12 to 14 year olds, since most social media services require you to be at least 12 years old to have an account.

But what if access to that entire age group is cut off entirely?

We’re seeing all over the world that jurisdictions are enacting or trying to enact bans on the use of social media for people under 16 years of age. The latest country to propose such a move is Indonesia:

“Authorities in the country, which is Southeast Asia’s largest economy, said Friday they expect social media platforms to deactivate the accounts of under-16s from March 28, starting with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox.”

In other words, all the popular sites that teens love.

And in certain jurisdictions, the companies will implement age verification and age estimation technology to ensure that kids don’t like about their ages to get in.

Assuming these prohibitions stand, this causes a huge problem for B2C marketers that target teens: how do you market to them when the direct pipelines to this age group are cut off?

I’m just thankful that Bredemarket and its clients sell to adults. You don’t really see 13 year olds buying biometric technology.

When Everyone Goes Multimodal: Iris ID and Faces

I’ve previously discussed the difference between the terms “multimodal” and “multifactor.”

Multimodal is often (though not exclusively) used to discuss the use of different biometric modalities. For example, when Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit was acquired, we joined an organization (Sagem Morpho) that specialized in three biometric modalities: finger, face, and iris.

From Sandeep Kumar, A. Sony, Rahul Hooda, Yashpal Singh, in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education | Multidisciplinary Academic Research, “Multimodal Biometric Authentication System for Automatic Certificate Generation.”

As you can imagine, the “which biometric is best” wars simply do not apply to the multimodal folks. Unlike someone committed to tongue biometrics because that’s all they do, a multimodal biometric vendor can say “this one’s best here, this other one’s best there.”

So I was a bit surprised to see the recent Biometric Update article, “Iris ID debuts in NIST FRTE 1:1.”

  • Iris ID is known for…well, irises.
  • FRTE is a face test.

I had some catching up to do.

After all, I was aware of the history of Iris ID (yet another New Jersey iris company) and its spinoff from LG, and although I don’t think I’ve ever met Mohammad Murad, I’ve certainly heard of him.

But Iris ID has branched off from just irises. Here’s what it exhibited at Identity Week America in September 2025:

“Highlighted in the Iris ID booth are the latest advances in multi-modal biometric technology, where iris and face recognition are combined in fully contactless solutions. These innovations are designed to deliver fast, frictionless throughput while ensuring accuracy and reliability, even in high-throughput environments.”

For what it’s worth, the Iris ID “001” algorithm tested in NIST FRTE 1:1 wasn’t an overwhelming world-beater, not even cracking the top 100 in any of NIST’s many, many categories (the best performance was in BORDER:BORDER).

But everyone has to start somewhere.

Just don’t get eyes and faces confused.

A biometric product marketing writer can help.

Assume No Mouth

When I first encountered facial recognition companies in the 1990s and early 2000s, the rules were pretty clear.

Their algorithms needed to identify people by their permanent features, not their temporary ones.

Don’t identify someone by a beard or a lipstick shade, but by what is usually always present: eyes, nose, ears…and mouth.

After all, it wasn’t like people were going to lose their mouths or anything.

Until 2020, when everyone started covering up their mouths.

And the algorithms had to adapt.

Biometric Product Marketing Expert? Strategic. Biometric Product Marketing Writer? Tactical.

It’s tough when you operate in both the strategic and tactical spheres.

Especially when you realize that “biometric product marketing expert” may sound lofty and strategic.

So to clear up the confusion, I am also a biometric product marketing writer.

Because I write.

A lot.

Articles, blog posts, case studies, data sheets, proposals, social media, web pages, white papers, and more.

If your biometric firm needs help getting your writing out, let’s talk.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

California Amazon Fresh Stores in Upland and Elsewhere Will Close Friday, March 13

From https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=TmiOy81L4MrbZTHOJU

“When will stores close?

“Most locations: February 1, 2026 

“California locations: March 13, 2026 (to comply with state requirements)”

Talking to Someone on the Other Side of the Ocean

I confess that I’m old enough to know what a “long distance call” meant. That was when you picked up a telephone and called someone in another state, or perhaps in the same state, and had to pay “long distance” charges to make the call. You obviously didn’t want to stay on the phone too long because those long distance charges could add up.

Today, of course, we can make video calls using one of several services for free. Not just to another state, but to anywhere around the world.

This wasn’t the case 100 years ago, because on March 7 (or March 6; sources vary), the very first telephone call was made from London, England, to New York, New York.

Whatever day it took place, this was no ordinary call. Telephone calls depended upon carrying voltage through cables, and of course there was no cable connecting London and New York. But it worked well enough that regular transatlantic telephone service was inaugurated in 1927.

This mainly catered to rich businessmen like Floyd C. Odlum (who later married aviator Jackie Cochran). Odlum made a 95 minute call to New York and, um, rang up a £285 bill in the process. In 1920s dollars, mind you. He should have waited a few years and just had his future wife fly to New York instead of making the call.