Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
During a videoconference this morning, I was asked to “tell me about yourself.”
I asked for 49 seconds for show and tell.
And displayed a 2015 Biometric Update article.
And played this Morphoway video.
For this videoconference, it was mostly appropriate.
When I first worked with (then) MorphoTrak’s MorphoWave in the mid-2010s, speed and convenience were the selling points.
A few years later, hygiene was all the rage for (now) IDEMIA and other companies.
As COVID recedes (for now), speed and convenience take center stage again.
Reminder to marketing leaders: if you need Bredemarket’s content-proposal-analysis help, book a meeting at https://bredemarket.com/mark/
Identity/biometric marketing leaders continuously talk about how their companies have reduced bias in their products. But have they reduced bias in their own marketing to ensure it resonates with prospects?
I recently talked about the problem of internal bias:
“Marketers are driven to accentuate the positive about their companies. Perhaps the company has a charismatic founder who repeatedly emphasizes how ‘insanely great’ his company is and who talked about ‘bozos.’ (Yeah, there was a guy who did both of those.)
“And since marketers are often mandated to create both external and internal sales enablement content, their view of their own company and their own product is colored.”
Let’s look at two examples of biometric marketing internal bias…and how to overcome it.
Well, I have my admittedly biased solution to prevent companies from tumbling into groupthink, drinking of Kool-Aid, and market irrelevance.
Contract with an outside biometric product marketing expert. (I just happen to know one…me.)
I haven’t spent 30 years immersed in your insular culture. I’ve heard all the marketing-speak from different companies, and I’ve written the marketing-speak for nearly two dozen of them. I can ensure that your content resonates with your external customers and prospects, not only with your employees.
All well and good…until…
“But John, what about your own biases? IDEMIA, Motorola, Incode, and other employers paid you for 25 years! You probably have an established process that you use to prepare andouillette at home, based upon a recipe from 2019!”
I don’t…but point taken. So how do I minimize my own biases?
My breadth of experience lessens the biases from my past. Look at my market-speak from 1994 to 2023, in order:
Add all the different messaging of Bredemarket’s clients, plus my continuous improvement (hello MOTO) of my capabilities, and I will ensure that my content, proposals, and analysis does not trap you in a dead end.
Are you ready to elevate your company with the outside perspective of a biometric product marketing expert?
Let’s talk (a free meeting). You explain, I ask questions, we agree on a plan, and then I act.
Schedule a meeting at https://bredemarket.com/mark/
(Imagen 4)
What a difference a few years makes.
Back in 2002, when I was an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS) product manager at Motorola, another fingerprint company, Identix, made an announcement.
“Identix Inc. and Visionics Corp. announce a strategic merger of equals in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $600 million.”
The word “synergy” was tossed about, justifiably. You see, while Identix had a long history with fingerprints, Visionics had a long history with facial recognition. So the new combined company would offer both fingerprint and face biometrics, something new for the time. So new that Visionics’ chairman and CEO, Dr. Joseph Atick, made the following statement:
“I believe this merger of equals is one of the most significant events in the history of the biometrics industry to date.”
One little footnote: the acquisition brought fingerprint provider Identix and its chief competitor Digital Biometrics into the same company, since Visionics had acquired Digital Biometrics in 2001.
Let’s, um, face it: the combined company (known as Identix) was positioned well against Visionics’ chief competitor, a company called Viisage.
But Viisage had plans of its own. Just two years later, it announced its own acquisition:
“In February, it bought Trans Digital Technologies (TDT), which supplies the digital printing system for U.S. passports, for $50 million in cash and stock. Last year, the Arlington, Va.-based TDT landed a five-year, $65 million contract extension with the U.S. State Department for the passport system.”
Which prompted Bernard Bailey, Viisage’s president and CEO, to declare that the acquisition of TDT was:
“…the single most important transformational event in Viisages history.”
So who was the true visionary: Atick, or Bailey? Or maybe someone else we haven’t mentioned yet?
While Identix and Visionics had some pretty significant components, neither could claim to be a true identity leader. Both companies not only had to compete against the traditional AFIS providers including Sagem Morpho and Motorola, but also against other identity providers. Take Digimarc, which beefed itself up considerably by acquiring Polaroid’s driver’s license business in 2001.
So by 2004, my Motorola “Biometric Business Unit” was competing against a bunch of companies, including:
Several years later, after several mergers (including the one that combined Identix and Viisage to form L-1 Identity Solutions, driven by Robert LaPenta’s L-1 Investment Partners who invested in Viisage), all of these companies would become part of the French aerospace company Safran.
Until Safran sold ALL of Morpho, including MorphoTrak and MorphoTrust, to the company that eventually became IDEMIA.
(Imagen 4. Not an exaggeration.)
The history of L-1 Identity Solutions has always fascinated me. I dealt with then-bitter enemies Digital Biometrics and Identix while I was at Printrak, with Viisage while I was at Motorola, and de facto competed with MorphoTrust while I was at MorphoTrak…until MorphoTrust in effect acquired MorphoTrak when IDEMIA NSS was set up and I reported to a supervisor in Massachusetts.
I used to have a PowerPoint presentation that traced the family tree of all of L-1’s acquisitions. Wish I still had it. But here’s a little taste of where things stood before Joseph Atick and Robert LaPenta started combining things:
(Some former links are dead and were removed from the bullets above. But the Digital Biometrics-Identix court case is described here, and Polaroid’s history with driver’s licenses in Utah is described here.)
Back in 2023 I assembled a list of “Five Topics a Biometric Content Marketing Expert Needs to Understand.” My fifth topic was “How L-1 Identity Solutions came to be.” I claimed I was half joking, but in reality I was completely serious. Despite similar efforts by HID and others (including IDEMIA), the sheer number of companies that combined to form L-1 remains unmatched.
Why do I have a sudden interest in things that happened at Morpho nearly 10 years ago, and at Printrak over 20 years ago? I’ll explain at the end of this post.
Let’s start by looking at my former employer Printrak. In the summer of 1996 Printrak became a publicly traded company, and had secured the four-letter ticker “AFIS” back when an automated fingerprint identification system was THE biometric solution. (Face schmace. Iris schmiris. Voice schmoice.)
But then Printrak began to get bigger.
These acquisitions, costing millions of dollars each, increased the capabilities of Printrak. Several years later, I would be part of creating a “digital justice solution” that married AFIS, CAD, RMS, mugshot, and other services.
But not yet. Before that could happen, Printrak changed dramatically.
There used to be an online document that listed the entire negotiation history of what happened after these acquisitions, but I can no longer access that document. Instead, I found a document that lists the final results:
“ITEM 5. OTHER EVENTS On August 28, 2000, Printrak International Inc. (the “Registrant”) issued a press release regarding an agreement (the “Merger Agreement”) among Motorola, Inc. (“Motorola”), the Registrant, Panther Acquisition Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Motorola (“Acquisition Sub”) and the Giles Living Trust UDT dated December 17, 1993, The Giles Family Foundation, and The Smith Family Revocable Trust dated October 2, 1992 (collectively referred to herein as the “Registrant’s Majority Stockholders”) pursuant to which Acquisition Sub will be merged (the “Merger”) with and into Registrant, with Registrant surviving the Merger as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Motorola. On August 28, 2000 the Registrant’s Majority Stockholders executed a written consent of stockholders approving the terms and authorizing the execution of the Merger Agreement by the Registrant. Under the Merger Agreement, Motorola has agreed to pay $12.1406 per share for all the outstanding common stock and common stock equivalents of Registrant for an aggregate merger consideration of approximately $160 million.”
In the language above, the two “Giles” entities were controlled by Richard Giles, who had joined De La Rue Printrak and then purchased the Printrak part from De La Rue. The Smith Family Revocable Trust was controlled by Charles Smith, another Printrak employee. While Printrak was a publicly traded entity, Richard Giles held over half the shares, and therefore had the power to sell, provided that the deal received the proper approvals from the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Romania, and other countries.
Why did Motorola want to acquire Printrak? Because Motorola needed a CAD product to pair with its significant business in police radios. And among Printrak’s acquisitions was a division with a CAD product, making that acquisition by far the most significant of the three acquisitions from 1997. Microfiche went nowhere, and the fact that the present company DataWorks Plus was founded in 2000 in Greenville, South Carolina is no accident.
But returning to Printrak, its growth through acquisitions made Printrak itself an acquisition target.
Fast forward a few years, and a lot had happened at the Motorola company that Printrak joined. I won’t go into the history of Motorola during that decade, but by 2008 the company was shedding businesses that weren’t critically important. The CAD and RMS business was critically important, but the fingerprint business—the original pre-1997 Printrak—was not.
Which naturally attracted the attention of a large French aerospace/defense company, Safran. This company, itself the merger of two firms, had its own fingerprint identification technology, but I’ll let Ken Moses and his co-authors (including Scott Swann) tell this part of the story:
“In the late 1970s, a computer engineering subsidiary of France’s largest financial institution responded to a request by the French Ministry of Interior to work on automated fingerprint processing for the French National Police. Later, this company joined with the Morphologic Mathematics Laboratory at the Paris School of Mines to form a subsidiary called Morpho Systems that went on to develop a functioning [AFIS].”
Morpho Systems and its North American subsidiary were acquired by several companies in succession, the last being Safran.
And Safran thought that Motorola’s “Biometric Business Unit” would complement its existing biometric activities. So Safran purchased the unit (including me) from the willing seller Motorola, which became part of MorphoTrak.
But Safran wasn’t done acquiring. As I previously noted:
“By 2011, Safran decided that it needed additional identity capabilities, so it acquired L-1 Identity Solutions and renamed the acquisition as MorphoTrust.”
Along the way Safran also acquired a controlling stake in GE Homeland Protection, which it renamed Morpho Detection.
These various acquisitions strengthened Safran’s identity and biometric capabilities, which was good because Safran’s competitors were also busy. Eventually the entire identity and security business was renamed “Morpho” after the little old French company from the 20th century. This was a major division within Safran’s empire…
…but Safran remained an aerospace/defense company, and Morpho was a distraction.
A distraction that attracted the attention of Advent International. Advent had acquired a company called Oberthur Technologies in 2011, with the intent of improving it and selling it for a profit. Advent decided that an Initial Public Offering (IPO) would be a way to realize this profit, but Oberthur withdrew its IPO in 2015.
Would Oberthur be a more attractive IPO if it was combined with another entity, such as the non-aerospace/defense part of Safran?
The upshot was that Advent and Safran started talking, resulting in a sale that created the combined (mostly) Advent-controlled entity OT-Morpho. But a name change happened a few months later.
I won’t get into the subsequent history of IDEMIA, in which Advent has spun off one part of IDEMIA, and may be spinning off another.
The point I want to make? Morpho’s growth through acquisitions made Morpho itself an acquisition target.
Now before someone slams me, I’m not making any predictions, just some observations.
Now let’s look at my former employer Incode. Unlike Printrak, Incode is not a publicly-traded firm. Like IDEMIA, Incode is held by private investors, although in Incode’s case there are multiple investors, not just one. Incode’s investors include General Atlantic, Softbank, J. P. Morgan, and others.
Lately Incode has been on an acquisition spree of its own.
Now remember that Incode’s investors didn’t invest just because they want to see cool technologies. They invested because they want to make money. And these moves potentially strenghthen Incode so that its investors may make a profit through an Incode IPO…
…or an acquisition of Incode by another entity, which would continue the consolidation of the identity/biometric industry.
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.
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.
So that’s my so-called experience with custom software development. If you’re looking for TRUE custom software development services, perhaps I can place you in touch with Silicon Tech Solutions.
While Bredemarket as an entity has only officially worked one trade show, my personal trade show, conference, and exhibition experience extends back years.
For example:
In a past life I was tasked with session and speaker coordination for an annual conference. Dozens of sessions, dozens of speakers, probably about a dozen rooms, a myriad of microphone and table and cable setups, a little under a week…plus a dozen planners and dozens of employees and third-party conference staff.
There were many ways in which things could go wrong:
Some of these things didn’t happen, but they could have…and if they did, it meant disruption of my “three chairs and 2 mics on the main stage on Tuesday at 8:45” meticulously made plans.
Yes, plans. I had them.
This was one of the times in which I fell back to Excel as my go-to project management tool, capturing all the necessary data, making it filterable and sortable.
The years have faded my memories of the details I tracked, but I needed to know session titles, dates and times, rooms, speakers, panelists, presentations, videos, live demos, on-stage chairs and tables, handouts, and other things besides.
And that was just for DURING the conference. BEFORE the conference I needed to ensure that session abstracts and speaker biographies were written and found their way to the printed conference program, the registration website, and the conference app.
This was also one of the times that I heavily relied on the color printer that was hidden away in the conference organizers’ area. And it had to be color, because some schedule items were green, some yellow…and some red.
The schedule was constantly revised. And as the week wore on and the days dwindled down to a precious few, I would hide the older rows on my schedule and literally lighten my workload.
I would grip the latest iteration of my private master schedule and race around the conference hotel—sometimes the Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa, sometimes another—checking things off my checklist. (All names are fictional.)
By mid afternoon Thursday the last large sessions were done, the last workshops were wrapping up, the last raffle prizes were given away, and all that was left was the final banquet. Plenty could go wrong there, also, but that’s not part of this story.
And Ringo’s real name was Sharon.
You knew that I was going to link to THIS Biometric Update post, because…well, I wrote it.
You can read “Opinion: Vendors must disclose responsible uses of biometric data” here: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202505/opinion-vendors-must-disclose-responsible-uses-of-biometric-data
Excerpt:
“Usually, the government agency or private organization acts as the “controller” or owner of the biometric data, while the biometric vendor is just the “processor” of the data.
“But there are exceptions. In late April, Joel R. McConvey described a proposal in which the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Police Department would provide Biometrica with 2.5 million facial images from its jail records.
“Why would any biometric vendor want to be the controller of biometric data? One plausible reason is for internal testing to improve the vendor’s algorithms by continuously testing them against live data. There may be other reasons, such as offering new services.”
But this is actually the SECOND time I have been featured by Biometric Update. If you check its YouTube channel, you can find the 2015 gem “MorphoTrak (Safran) – MorphoWay demo”: https://youtube.com/shorts/mqfHAc227As
Stay tuned for my next Biometric Update appearance in 2035.
The COVID-19 pandemic may be a fading memory, but contactless biometrics remains popular.
Back in the 1980s, you had to touch something to get the then-new “livescan” machines to capture your fingerprints. While you no longer had messy ink-stained fingers, you still had to put your fingers on a surface that a bunch of other people had touched. What if they had the flu? Or AIDS (the health scare of that decade)?
As we began to see facial recognition in the 1990s and early 2000s, one advantage of that biometric modality was that it was CONTACTLESS. Unlike fingerprints, you didn’t have to press your face against a surface.
But then fingerprints also became contactless after someone asked an unusual question in 2004.
“Actually this effort launched before that, as there were efforts in 2004 and following years to capture a complete set of fingerprints within 15 seconds…”
This WAS an unusual question, considering that it took a minute or more to capture inked prints or livescan prints. And the government expected this to happen in 15 seconds?
A decade later several companies were pursuing this in conjunction with NIST. There were two solutions: dedicated kiosks such as MorphoWave from my then-employer MorphoTrak, and solutions that used a standard smartphone camera such as SlapShot from Sciometrics and Integrated Biometrics.
The, um, upshot is that now contactless fingerprint and face capture are both a thing. Contactless capture provides speed, and even the impossible 15 second capture target was blown away.
Fingers and faces can be captured “on the move” in airports, border crossings, stadiums, and university lunchrooms and other educational facilities.
Perhaps Iris and voice can be considered contactless and fast.
But even “rapid” DNA isn’t that rapid.
Bredemarket