Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
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.
Each person has certain immutable attributes associated with them, such as their blood type. And other attributes, such as their fingerprints and iris characteristics, which are mostly immutable. (Although I defy anyone to change their irises.)
But other things associated with us are all too mutable. If we use these for identification, we’ll end up in trouble.
Let’s take one of the many attributes associated with Elvis Presley. If you haven’t heard of Presley, he was a popular singer in the mid 20th century. He’s even in Britannica.
(As a point of clarification, the song “Radio Radio” is associated with a DIFFERENT Elvis.)
Among many other songs, Presley is associated with the song “Don’t Be Cruel.”
Presley was not only the performer, but also the credited co-songwriter.
After all, that’s what BMI says when you search its Songview database. See BMI work ID 317493.
So if BMI says Presley co-wrote it, it must be true. Right?
Um, no. In reality, the song was written by Otis Blackwell alone.
So what’s the deal? The deal was this:
“…he listened to a selection of acetate demos provided by Freddy Bienstock, the new song representative assigned to Elvis by his publishers, Hill and Range. He chose “Don’t Be Cruel” by an obscure Brooklyn-born r&b singer and songwriter, Otis Blackwell. As per Hill and Range’s contractual requirement, it came with the assignment of half the publishing to Elvis Presley Music and half the writer’s share to Elvis Presley, but as Blackwell, the first of Elvis’ great “contract” writers, was always quick to point out, it was the best deal he ever made.”
Many songs are credited to Presley as a songwriter, but in reality he wrote few if any of them. Yet the “songwriter” attribute is assigned to him. Do we simply accept what BMI says and move on?
But there are other instances in which there are no back room deals, yet a song is strongly associated with a musical entity who never wrote it.
Take BMI Work ID 542061. The credited songwriters for this particular song are Robert Valentine Braddock and Claude Putnam, more commonly known as Bobby Braddock and Curly Putnam. According to RolandNote, Braddock and Putnam began writing this song on March 4, 1977 and finished it on October 18, 1977.
It was recorded by Johnny Russell on either March 7, 1978 (RolandNote), or January 18, 1979 (Second Hand Songs), or both (Classic Country Music Stories). But no recording was released.
Then George Jones recorded the song on February 6, 1980 with subsequent overdubs (“You know she came to see him one last time”) when he was more sober. His reaction?
“I looked [producer] Billy [Sherrill] square in the eye and said ‘nobody’s gonna buy that thing, it’s too morbid.’”
And morbid it was. Although popular music in general and country music in particular has never shied away from morbid songs.
Released the next month on March 18, the song was never associated with Braddock, Putnam, Russell, or Sherrill ever again. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is completely associated with George Jones.
I am moved by the lyrical and emotional build-up, beginning with the very first line.
He said, “I’ll love you ’til I die”
After additional lines regarding a man’s unrequited love, the narrator enters the picture.
I went to see him just today
Oh but I didn’t see no tears
All dressed up to go away
First time I’d seen him smile in years
As for what happened next…listen to the song.
Now there’s a particular article that I wrote for a Bredemarket client a couple of years ago that used a slow reveal “reverse timeline” effect. Starting with 2022 and moving back in time to 2019, I slowly dropped the details about a missing person who was identified via biometric technology, finally solving the mystery of the person’s identity (Connerjack Oswalt).
But I’m no Braddock/Putnam.
And I’m no George Jones.
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
I previously mused about an alternative universe in which a single human body had ten (different) faces.
Facial recognition would be more accurate if biometric systems had ten faces to match. (Kind of like you-know-what.)
Well, now I’m getting ridiculous by musing about a person with one hundred faces for identification.
When I’m not musing about alternative universes with different biometrics, I’m helping identity/biometric firms market their products in this one.
And this frivolous exercise actually illustrates a significant difference between fingerprints and faces, especially in use cases where subjects submit all ten fingerprints but only a single face. The accuracy benefits are…well, they’re ten times more powerful.
Are there underlying benefits in YOUR biometric technology that you want to highlight? Bredemarket can help you do this. Book a free meeting with me, and I’ll ask you some questions to figure out where we can work together.
I made this available to someone else, so I’m making it available to you. If you’re interested in a non-branded clip of the ten faces, here it is below.
The complete branded version remains at https://bredemarket.com/2026/01/12/1012/
The question again: if a human body had ten faces, how accurate would facial recognition be?
And the companion question…well, you’ll have to go to the branded version to see that.
Bredemarket