If you missed my May writings, the friction ridges on fingerprints, palm prints, and elsewhere are used for everything from solving crimes to protecting smartphones.
If your biometric company offers a product that harnesses the power of friction ridges to identify people…do your prospects know about how your solution benefits them?
I grew up in a time when phones were attached to the wall and not to us.
When something called a “card catalog” was an essential research tool.
And when the best way to learn the lyrics to your favorite song was to go to the drug store and buy the monthly magazine that listed all the song lyrics.
Imagen 4.
Not that this was necessary for ALL songs. You could pretty much figure out the lyrics to “53 Miles West of Venus.”
Imagen 4.
But for some songs you definitely needed the lyric magazines. Because the lyrics may not be on the record, and probably wouldn’t be on the cassette. And in those innocent days in which we didn’t yet do ourselves a favor by unplugging the jukebox—and we certainly didn’t hang the deejay—the guy behind the turntables didn’t know them either.
Imagen 4.
Of course it’s a lot different today. The phone, no longer attached to the wall, displays lyrics from websites such as Genius, music streaming services such as Spotify, and lyric videos posted on sites such as YouTube.
While I’ve previously addressed pharma commercialization in terms of ensuring that patients use (and purchase) their medications, commercialization occurs long before that. After all, for a prescription drug to be available on the market, it has to get to the market in the first place.
“Early-stage biopharma companies have traditionally had limited options for getting their first asset to market. In most cases, they pursue deals with larger partners and lose or limit rights to their asset, or become a fully integrated company through heavy investment and a great deal of risk.”
Syneos Health has a solution for that. To learn the details of Syneos Health’s full-service pharma commercialization solution, visit this page.
Oh, and the company also has case studies.
“We helped build a European commercial capability via a comprehensive commercialization partnership, introducing a Commercial Leadership function to support the design and execution of the overall launch plan and integrate other services. We were able to scale quickly and establish commercial operations, designed a European launch plan and forecast and launched within three months in one EU country, with a subsequent sequenced launch through Europe, despite the ambiguities of COVID-19.
“In 12 weeks, we provided a full virtual infrastructure that included Field Teams, MSLs, Access Teams, Marketplace and Access/Pricing Consulting, Advertising, Public Relations and Medical Communications, increasing operational efficiencies through integrated Communications teams to reduce duplication in effort across promotional channels and recruiting, training and deploying sales reps, achieving an annual run rate of >$200 million.
“We partnered with the commercial team to provide all commercial launch services, offering crucial global leadership that enabled the team to dynamically scale up and down to respond to changing launch timelines and to balance short- and long-term financial objectives. With a heavy emphasis on market development, we empowered the customer to be fully engaged and aligned with all communities and show an in-depth understanding of market dynamics.”
By Sunday, my earlier mention of Orlando will make no sense. There will be some other niche conference going on, and the IAI folks will be back at their home agencies, resuming work.
While some blogs are evergreen, many are transitory and only live in the moment.
How can blog posts increase the awareness of your identity/biometric or technology company’s products and services? I’m going to explain how in this blog post.
Imagine there’s a funnel. It’s easy if you try. But this funnel doesn’t stream water, but people. (Or wombats.)
The funnel. Imagen 4.
In this funnel, the people (or wombats) who are potentially interested in your offering—your prospects—start at the very top. The few who actually buy your offering emerge from the bottom.
But how do you get people to enter the funnel and become aware of your offering?
How can blog posts help you?
One great way to let people know about your offering is by blog posts such as this one.
Blogs are a fast way to tell your prospects how your offering can help them. And you can create blog posts very quickly, within days or even hours.
If you want to make prospects aware of your company’s service, write a blog post.
What can Bredemarket offer to you?
One of Bredemarket’s offerings is…writing blog posts for other companies. I can help your identity/biometric or technology company write blog posts so you can get more people to learn about your services.
If you want to learn how I can help your company write blog posts, visit bredemarket.com/mark.
Last month I discussed Google’s advances in health and artificial intelligence, specifically the ability to MedGemma and MedSigLIP to analyze medical images. But writing about health is more problematic. Either that, or Google AI is growing body parts such as the “basilar ganglia.”
“In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions.
“It identified an “old left basilar ganglia infarct,” referring to a purported part of the brain — “basilar ganglia” — that simply doesn’t exist in the human body. Board-certified neurologist Bryan Moore flagged the issue to The Verge, highlighting that Google fixed its blog post about the AI — but failed to revise the research paper itself.”
A little scary…especially the fact that it took a year to discover the error, a conflation of the basal ganglia (in the brain) and the basilar artery (at the brainstem). There’s no “basilar ganglia” per se.
And the MedGemma engine that I discussed last month has its own problems.
“Google’s more advanced healthcare model, dubbed MedGemma, also led to varying answers depending on the way questions were phrased, leading to errors some of the time.”
One could argue that the same thing could happen with humans. After all, if a patient words a problem in one way to one doctor, and in a different way to a different doctor, you could also have divergent diagnoses.
But this reminds us that we need to fact-check EVERYTHING we read.
Some of you may remember the Pink Floyd song “Us and Them.” The band had a history of examining things from different perspectives, to the point where Roger Waters and the band subsequently conceived a very long playing record (actually two records) derived from a single incident of Waters spitting on a member of the audience.
Is it OK to spit on the audience…or does this raise the threat of the audience spitting on you? Things appear different when you’re the recipient.
And yes, this has everything to do with generative artificial intelligence and pornographic deepfakes. Bear with me here.
Non-Consensual Activity in AI Apps
My former IDEMIA colleague Peter Kirkwood recently shared an observation on the pace of innovation and the accompanying risks.
“I’m a strong believer in the transformative potential of emerging technologies. The pace of innovation brings enormous benefits, but it also introduces risks we often can’t fully anticipate or regulate until the damage is already visible.”
Marr begins by explaining what “nudification apps” can do, and notes the significant financial profits that criminals can realize by employing them, Marr then outlines what various countries are doing to battle nudification apps and their derived content, including the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Australia.
But then Marr notes why some people don’t take nudification all that seriously.
“One frustration for those campaigning for a solution is that authorities haven’t always seemed willing to treat AI-generated image abuse as seriously as they would photographic image abuse, due to a perception that it isn’t real’.”
First they created the deepfakes of the hot women
After his experiences under the Nazi regime, in which he transitioned from sympathizer to prisoner, Martin Niemoller frequently discussed how those who first “came for the Socialists” would eventually come for the trade unionists, then the Jews…then ourselves.
And I’m sure that some of you believe I’m trivializing Niemoller’s statement by equating deepfake creation with persecution of socialists. After all, deepfakes aren’t real.
“Being targeted by deepfake nudes is profoundly distressing, especially for adolescents and young adults. Deepfake nudes violate an individual’s right to bodily autonomy—the control over one’s own body without interference. Victims experience a severe invasion of privacy and may feel a loss of control over their bodies, as their likeness is manipulated without consent. This often leads to shame, anxiety, and a decreased sense of self-worth. Fear of social ostracism can also contribute to anxiety, depression, and, in extreme cases, suicidal thoughts.”
And again I raise the question. If it’s OK to create realistic-looking pornographic deepfakes of hot women you don’t know, or of children you don’t know, then is it also OK to create realistic-looking pornographic deepfakes of your own family…or of you?
Guardrails
Imagen 4.
The difficulty, of course, is enforcing guardrails to stop this activity. Even if most of the governments are in agreement, and most of the businesses (such as Meta and Alphabet) are in agreement, “most” does not equal “all.” And as long as there is a market for pornographic deepfakes, someone will satisfy the demand.
It seems that some so-called “businesses” are using an EIN as a facade for illegal activity…and insufficient identity assurance is preventing the fraudsters from being caught.
Obtaining Employer Identification Numbers to commit tax fraud
What is an EIN? In the same way that U.S. citizens have Social Security Numbers, U.S. businesses have Employer Identification Numbers. It’s not a rigorous process to get an EIN; heck, Bredemarket has one.
But maybe it needs to be a little more rigorous, according to TIGTA.
“EINs are targeted and used by unscrupulous individuals to commit fraud. In July 2021, we reported that there were hundreds of potentially fraudulent claims for employer tax credits….Further, in April 2024, our Office of Investigations announced that it helped prevent $3.5 billion from potentially being paid to fraudsters. Our special agents identified a scheme where individuals obtained an EIN for the sole purpose of filing business tax returns to improperly claim pandemic-related tax credits.”
Yes, that’s $3.5 billion with a B. That’s a lot of fraud.
Perhaps the pandemic has come and gone, but the temptation to file fraudulent business tax returns with an improperly-obtained EIN continues.
Facade.
Enter the Identity Assurance Level
So how does the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) gatekeep the assignment of EINs?
By specifying an Identity Assurance Level (IAL) before assigning an EIN.
Specifically, Identity Assurance Level 1.
“In December 2024, the IRS completed the annual reassessment of the Mod IEIN system. The IRS rated the identity proofing and authentication requirements at Level 1 (the same level as the initial assessment in January 2020).”
IAL1 doesn’t “assure” anything…except continued tax fraud
If you’ve read the Bredemarket blog or other biometric publications, you know that IAL1 is, if I may use a technical term, a “nothingburger.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says this about IAL1:
“There is no requirement to link the applicant to a specific real-life identity. Any attributes provided in conjunction with the subject’s activities are self-asserted or should be treated as self-asserted (including attributes a CSP asserts to an RP). Self-asserted attributes are neither validated nor verified.”
If that isn’t a shady way to identity a business, I don’t know what is.
But I agree with TIGTA’s assertion that Identity Assurance Level 2, with actual evidence of the real-world identity, should be the minimum.
Does your firm offer an IAL2/IAL3 product?
And if your identity/biometric firm offers a product that conforms to IAL2 or IAL3, and you need assistance creating product marketing content, talk to Bredemarket.
Bredemarket provides several services, but one service I don’t provide is custom software development.
Even though I’ve launched mobile apps.
Well, not really.
During my final years at MorphoTrak, I handled speaker and session coordination for the company’s annual Users Conference. Among my duties were managing the loading of speaker and session biographies into the CVENT-powered conference website.
CVENT had a sister mobile app known as CrowdCompass that allowed presentation of the information in mobile form. I briefly mentioned the app before. You would load your information into the existing framework, and then CVENT would facilitate the approval of your custom app in the App Store and Google Play.
From a Google search.
I found an online reference to one of my old apps, but the app itself does not appear to be on the CNET website.
And you know that picture of me at a podium, waving my arm around? I was evangelizing my app to the Users Conference crowd.
Evangelizing my so-called custom software development.
Bredemarket 