Have been back from Cartes now for a few weeks but have been so busy with work I have not had a chance to blog, I have to say I had a really good time.
At first I felt this was not going to be the best use of my 2nd week in my new role but I do have to say I found it very valuable; I was able to get up to speed on what has changed in the smartcard space, meet with a number of card vendors/solution providers, attend and participate in PC/SC and to top it all off I got to visit Ireland (which I love BTW) which gave me a chance to meet with some of the folks who call it home.
The whole strike thing ended up not being a huge impact (though I do have a story to share) thanks to my new friends at GrIDSure. I ran into these guys at my hotel during my 1st breakfast, they were kind enough to let me tag along with them on their way to the show as well as in the evenings for dinner and such.
I have to say, there were certainly one of the highlights of my trip; great guys all-around; I wish them the very best! They have taken the idea of password grids and are commercializing them, for those that are not familiar with the approach it’s a means to get multi-factor authentication and some protection from key loggers by leveraging your knowledge of both the password and the position of the password on the grid.
Previously I have talked about IronKey, and how they do a great job of mitigating nearly all of the top level risks a solution like theirs has to; one area they have not provided a solution to however is guest machine key loggers (assuming personal machines are secured); this is a hard problem to solve without the introduction of a external Pin Entry Device (PED) or Biometric reader, and it’s an area the GrIDSure solution could potentially help without such hardware.
It’s also a interesting alternative to password cadence systems like BioPassword which has some interesting usability challenges (like shared accounts, people with disabilities, broken arms/hands, etc); I have kind of digressed so let see if I can move on .
OK, back to the strike; the second day of the strike getting a taxi to get us to the show at in time for its opening was shall we say “a challenge”, no one wanted to drive to the exhibition hall because traffic back was going to be murder. We did manage to find a taxi that would get us to the train station where there was supposed to be some shared shuttle that would take folks to the exhibition hall but either that shuttle never came or we just couldn’t find it.
We ended up having to practically beg taxi’s to take us, but again we had very little luck until we found (after trying no less than 6 cars) a entrepreneurial (is that how you spell extortionist) driver who would take us for $250 EUR (that’s $368.45), the thing to keep in mind is that when I arrived the taxi from the airport (which is further than the exhibition hall) to the hotel was only $50 EUR and we were already 1/3 closer to the exhibition hall because of our 1st taxi.
In all my travels (and I have had the luxury to visit many cool places) I have not had a experience quite like that before, only in Paris.
Let see I also had a chance to meet with a reader of my blog (I am always love to get emails from readers who want to meet up), this was Eyal he works in the smartcard business for a provider called SC2 we had a great talk about the product space as well as a number of other topic.
That takes me to Ireland, oh do I love Ireland; my biggest regret of the trip was not being able to stay the weekend and enjoy more of their pub culture. I think Ireland has much of best of the PCNW and EU, all neatly packaged with a pub on every corner.
All-in-all a very productive trip where I had a lot of fun.
[Updated 12/18/2007] Neil from GrIDSure sent me a couple pictures from Cartes, check them out here.