Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
If you’re wearing gloves, a biometric system can’t capture your fingerprints.
If you’re looking away from the camera, a biometric system can’t capture your face.
These are extreme examples of “failure to acquire,” but some systems don’t even account for these cases.
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 previously wrote about how clean data is the new oxygen (stealing a phrase from someone else), but sometimes more data is better. Sometimes.
Let me use the fingerprint example. If you have a single fingerprint from one person, you have data that you can use to match against a person’s tenprint record.
But if you have two fingerprints, then you have twice as much data for the match. And Mister Math tells us that ten fingerprints yields much more data.
Now there are cases where you don’t have all ten search prints. Perhaps you’re taking latent prints from a crime scene and the suspect didn’t carefully leave all ten prints. Or you’re using contactless fingerprint capture and for some reason didn’t get the full tenprint record. But if you can get all ten fingerprints for search, then your match accuracy increases.
But is an abundance of data better?
Only if it’s clean.
If finger numbers are misclassified, or if fingerprints from multiple people are mixed in the same individual record, or if the minutiae are not marked correctly, then the dirty data messes up your process.
Which is why the quality of data in a fingerprint database is important.
And if you need to talk about your fingerprint product’s quality assurance measures, Bredemarket can help. Book a free meeting with me to discuss your needs.
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.
(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.
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
Bredemarket reserves the right to revisit topics I visited before.
Imagine an alternative universe in which a single human body had ten (different) faces and only one finger.
Think about the ramifications.
Credit for this thought, not original to me, must still remain anonymous.
But if you would like to discuss your biometric marketing and writing needs with a biometric product marketing expert, fill out the “free 30 minute content needs assessment” form on the page linked below to schedule a free conversation.
Bredemarket works with a number of technologies, but it’s no secret that my primary focus is biometrics. After all, I call myself the “biometric product marketing expert,” having worked with friction ridge (fingerprint, palm print), face, iris, voice, and rapid DNA.
If I can help your biometric firm with your content, proposal, or analysis needs, schedule a free meeting with me to discuss how I can help.
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
Imagine an alternative universe in which a single human body had ten (different) faces and only one finger.
Think about the ramifications.
Credit for this thought, not original to me, must remain anonymous.
I’m jumping ahead in the year-end post ridiculousness to cite Bredemarket’s two most notable accomplishments this year. Not to detract from my other accomplishments this year, but these two were biggies.
The first was my Biometric Update guest post in May, “Opinion: Vendors must disclose responsible uses of biometric data.” I discussed elsewhere my reasons for writing this, and created a Bredemarket-hosted video summarizing my main points.
The second was my go-to-market effort for a Bredemarket client in September, which I discussed (without mentioning my participation) here. And there’s a video for that effort also.
I’ve accomplished many other things this year: client analyses, blog posts (both individually and in series), consultations, presentations, press releases, proposals, requirements documents, sales playbooks, and many more.
And I still have three more weeks to accomplish things.
Facial recognition and DNA can’t tell identical twins apart. (Well, not unless you can detect somatic mutations.) Even Santa can’t tell.
And fingerprints don’t work because everyone at the North Pole wears gloves.
Bredemarket