Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
Someone who is a biometric product marketing expert.
Someone who has three decades of expertise in biometrics.
Someone who has worked with fingerprints, faces, irises, voices, DNA, and other biometric modalities.
Someone who understands the privacy landscape in Europe (GDPR), Illinois (BIPA), California, and elsewhere.
Oh…and someone who can write.
I know someone. Bredemarket.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the Bredemarket blog looking at a variety of NIST studies of different biometric modalities.
But you can read up on them yourself.
NIST has investigated the following biometric modalities, using both definitions of the word biometrics:
But NIST has not spent taxpayer money researching other biometric modalities, such as tongue identification.
For a moment I’m going to veer away from finger, face, iris, voice, and DNA and veer toward geolocation.
I don’t live in New York City.
Technically I don’t live in the Mojave Desert either.
But Ontario, California is closer, both in geography and in climate, to the High Desert than to the Eastern Seaboard.
I guess California knows how to party by walking around with self promotion signs.
And if my biometric product marketing expertise can help your firm, let’s talk.
Here’s a quote from Runar Bjorhovde, senior analyst for smartphones and connected devices at Omdia.
“I think the biggest step many biometrics players can take to prove their importance is within marketing — in addition to maintaining their current innovation. Actually explaining why these sensors are so important and what they enable can massively help to simplify them to users, consequently making the value easier to understand.”
I heartily agree that the “why” is important.
With all the news about Amazon Fresh closing and more Amazon layoffs taking place, I missed a bit of news about the Amazon One palm-vein technology. But first a bit of history.
I believe I first wrote about Amazon One back in 2021, in a “biometrics is evil” post.
In that year, TechCrunch loudly proclaimed:
“While the idea of contactlessly scanning your palm print to pay for goods during a pandemic might seem like a novel idea, it’s one to be met with caution and skepticism given Amazon’s past efforts in developing biometric technology. Amazon’s controversial facial recognition technology, which it historically sold to police and law enforcement, was the subject of lawsuits that allege the company violated state laws that bar the use of personal biometric data without permission.”
Yes, Amazon was regarded as part of the evil fascist regime even when Donald Trump WASN’T in office.
Which brings us to 2025, when Trump had returned to office and I enrolled in Amazon One myself to better buy things at the Upland, California Amazon Fresh. But the line was too long so I went to Whole Foods, where my palm and vein may or may not have worked.
And pretty soon we’ll ALL be going to Whole Foods since Amazon Fresh is rebranding or closing all its locations.
And when we get there, we won’t be using Amazon One.
“Amazon One palm authentication services will be discontinued at retail businesses on June 3, 2026. Amazon One user data, including palm data, will be deleted after this date.”
You know the question I asked. Why?
“In response to limited customer adoption…”
Of course, in Amazon’s case, “limited” may merely mean that billions and billions of people didn’t sign up, so it jettisoned the technology in the same way it jettisoned dozens of stores and thousands of employees.
The June date may or may not apply to healthcare, but who knows how long that will last.
In my 2021 post I mentioned three other systems that used biometrics for purchases.
There was the notorious Pay By Touch (not notorious because of its technology, but the way the business was run).
There was the niche MorphoWave.
But the third system dwarfs them all.
“But the most common example that everyone uses is Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, or whatever ‘pay’ system is supported on your smartphone. Again, you don’t have to pull out a credit card or ID card. You just have to look at your phone or swipe your finger on the phone, and payment happens.”
And they’re so entrenched that even Amazon can’t beat them.
Or as I said after the latest round of Amazon layoffs:
“This, combined with its rebranding or closure of all Amazon Fresh stores, clearly indicates that Amazon is in deep financial trouble.
“Bezos did say that Amazon would fail some day, but I didn’t expect the company to fall apart this quickly.”
As I’ve said before, there may be many different stakeholders for a particular purchase opportunity.
For the purpose of this post I’m going to dramatically simplify the process by saying there are only two stakeholders for any RFP and any proposal responding to said RFP: “business” people, and “technical” people.
Returning to my oft-repeated example of an automated biometric identification system purchase by the city of Ontario, California, let’s look at what the business and technical people want:
So both parties are reading your proposal or other document, looking for these points.
So who is your “target audience” for your proposal?
Both of them.
Whether you’re writing a proposal or a data sheet, make sure that your document addresses the needs of both parties, and that both parties can easily find the information they’re seeking.
If I may take the liberty of stereotyping business and technical users, and if the document in question is a single sheet with printing on front and back, one suggestion is to put the business benefits on the front of the document with pretty pictures that resonate with the readers, and the technical benefits on the back of the document where engineers are accustomed to read the fine print specs.
Or something.
But if both business and technical subject matter experts are involved in the purchase decision, cater to both. You wouldn’t want to write a document solely for the techies when the true decision maker is a person who doesn’t know NFIQ from OFIQ.
I went ahead and created my original concept of this reel.
The third version, using Frank Zappa’s “A Little Green Rosetta,” was only created as an Instagram story and will therefore disappear from public view by Tuesday evening.
I guessed that’s supposed to encourage you to subscribe to the Bredemarket Instagram account, but I don’t think Green Rosetta is a strong selling point. Too bad “Watermelon in Easter Hay” doesn’t fit the reel subject matter.
On Monday afternoon, I was writing “draft 0.5” of a document for a Bredemarket client. Among other topics, the document noted how the quality of biometric capture affects future identification capability.
By Monday evening…this happened.
By the way, the accompanying music is “Dramatic Emotional Piano” by makesound music.
Although when I was originally conceptualizing the silhouette, I was thinking of the instrumental interlude toward the end (about 4 minutes in) of Elton John’s “I’ve Seen That Movie Too.”
Yeah, that song’s over fifty years on. Something I will address on my personal LinkedIn profile later this evening.
An interesting item popped up in SAM.gov. According to a Request for Information (RFI) due February 20, the FBI may have interest in a system for secret biometric searches.
“The FBI intends to identify available software solutions to store and search subjects at the classified level. This solution is not intended to replace the Next Generation Identification System Functionality, which was developed and implemented in collaboration with the FBI’s federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial partners. The solution shall reside at the Secret and/or Top-Secret/SCI level with the ability to support data feeds from external systems. The solution must allow the ability to enroll and search face, fingerprint, palmprint, iris, and latent fingerprints, and associated biographic information with a given set of biometrics.”
Now remember that the Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is protected from public access by requiring all users to adhere to the CJIS Security Requirements. But the CJIS Security Requirements aren’t Secret or Top Secret. These biometric searches, whatever they are, must REALLY be kept from prying eyes.
The RFI itself is 8 pages long, and is mysteriously numbered as RFI 01302025. I would have expected an RFI number 01152026. I believe this was an editing error, since FBI RFI 01302025 was issued in 2025 for a completely different purpose.
Whatever the real number is, the RFI is labeled “Classified Identity-Based Biometric System.” No acronym was specified, so I’m self-acronyming it as CIBS. Perhaps the system has a real acronym…but it’s secret.
If your company can support such a system from a business, technical, and security perspective, the due date is February 20 and questions are due by February 2. See SAM.gov for details.
Bredemarket