As the leading developer of access management systems for digital publishing, we were naturally intrigued by IBM’s prediction before Christmas: ‘You will never need a password again‘. This is one of the five predictions IBM made about ‘innovations that will change the way we live, work and play in the next five years’. Biometric data, it seems, will not only tighten up security online but also massively simplify the business of authenticating your identity, something we all have to do wearyingly often nowadays.
‘Over the next five years, your unique biological identity and biometric data – facial definitions, iris scans, voice files, even your DNA – will become the key to safeguarding your personal identity and information and replace the current user ID and password system.’
Five years really isn’t all that long a time. So, should we at Semantico retool all our client sites for the coming change and rewrite our software accordingly? It may surprise you to learn that we didn’t hire in some extra developers to start working on the task over Christmas.
Continue reading No-passwords prediction is an IBM-barrassment
As the leading developer of access management systems for digital publishing, we were naturally intrigued by IBM’s prediction before Christmas: ‘You will never need a password again‘. This is one of the five predictions IBM made about ‘innovations that will change the way we live, work and play in the next five years’. Biometric data, it seems, will not only tighten up security online but also massively simplify the business of authenticating your identity, something we all have to do wearyingly often nowadays.
‘Over the next five years, your unique biological identity and biometric data – facial definitions, iris scans, voice files, even your DNA – will become the key to safeguarding your personal identity and information and replace the current user ID and password system.’
Five years really isn’t all that long a time. So, should we at Semantico retool all our client sites for the coming change and rewrite our software accordingly? It may surprise you to learn that we didn’t hire in some extra developers to start working on the task over Christmas.
Continue reading 
being interviewed at the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing conference in Frankfurt. He spoke at the conference about mobile platforms from the perspective of publishers faced with multiple delivery models including apps and the web.
Have a listen and let us know what you think.
When I was preparing a couple of articles on social media for this blog earlier in the year, I had a quick scoot around Google to see if I could find a taxonomy of social media. I hadn’t realised it would be such a big ask.
It seemed, to me at least, a fairly reasonable request. Standard research procedure. You’re surveying a particular knowledge area and you want a map of the terrain and boundaries; some kind of idea of what the thing you’re researching might contain and how these contents can be broken down into logical categories. I wasn’t asking for a precise ontology, just a usable classification scheme.
Aside from the unsatisfactory nature of what I turned up, (follow the links in this post by all means and judge for yourself whether I’m being too harsh), the question soon loomed of why on earth I would expect such a thing to be available.
I was sure we’d entered the space age. It weighed as much as a small car, but its silver disks were things of futuristic beauty. I held cinema days for friends. ‘It’s great,’ they said. ‘Really groovy’ – this was the early 80′s – ‘But can’t it do anything else?’
They’d heard of machines able to tape television while you were out.
They’d seen the future.
LaserDisc players are no more, and this year’s must-have bit of kit is the e-reader. A herd of cheap devices are lining up to be the next electronic white elephant. Everyone reads digital these days, in case you didn’t know. Books are so last year. Think of the trees.