On the road to Bandol

The SIMagine contest is being launched today at Sophia Antipolis, with a one-day conference. This year’s SIMagine contest is a bit different than the previous ones, as it is sponsored by the entire SIM Allliance, and sponsored by several mobile operators.

But of course, the most important news is that the technologies on which the idea should be based are now mostly Java Card 3.0 and/or Smart Card Web Server, as well as NFC. SIM Toolkit is mentioned, but only in support of the two previous ones (think OTA provisioning).

So, now is the time to get your ideas through! 50 teams will be selected, who will receive support for the development of the initial idea.

I guess that now is the time to make public the claims that I was making this morning in the introduction for the Smart University training: Value will come by combining the various technologies, not by “porting” existing applications into new environments.

Let me be a bit more explicit.

I will simply takea few examples of very classical applications:

• A smart card-based payment application. We can adapt an EMV-like application, by using NC and adding a few interactions using a Web server (look at your history, present your PIN). But added value will come from elsewhere: allow the cardholder to perform risk management operations directly on the card (changing limits, allowing payments in a given country, etc.).
• A Web-based payment application. You can leverage a smart card in several ways. First, within your browser, a Java Card 3.0 application can provide a sophisticated/personalized strong authentication, and provide some protection agaisnt phishing. Then, the NFC interface can be used as a reader to reload the account from a contactless payment card.
• A SIM-based address book. Our contacts are rapidly moving away from our SIM, as we rely more and more on mail clients and online tools to manage contacts. Today, we expect our contacts to be available on every device we own, and to remain synchronized at all times. A Java Card 3.0 application can be used to display and edit the USIM contacts. In addition to this basic service, it can offer all the basic mash-ups around it, like getting directions to get to someone’s home. Most importantly, this application can offer a synchronization and backup service, connected to any of the existing online contact management applications (including imports). One may note that, by relying on an online service, the SIM address book is losing its major appeal: portability. This means that there are still some ideas missing here, and that we will need to do a bit more to get contacts back into the SIM. I guess that this is the contest’s goal.

The message is here very simple. Success comes by adding entirely new value to an existing application, or by combining an existing application with another one. Of course, there is another path to success, which is to create an entirely new application.

As I mentioned before, I believe that trust issues are pervasive in today’s world, and it seems that Gemalto((I know, I said that I wouldn’t talk about them too much, but I just happen to have a renewed interest in that company lately, so I read their communication more carefully than usually.)) seems to agree on this, through their corporate communication. Take a look at the latest copy of The Review, and you will see many things about Internet, mobile, personal, and trust.

I hope that this SIMagine contest will be successful, and that Smart Card Web Servers in general and Java Card 3.0 in general will benefit from it by showing new and innovative uses for these local Web servers. Let’s hope that enough people propose interesting entries. I will try to follow the contest.