Floppy Drive Reads Smartcards

Rainer Mauth

Smartcards are one of the keys to secure electronic commerce. They are rapidly gaining acceptance as a means for storing, processing, and securing information as well as storing electronic money. The only problem: Smartcard readers that attach to computers are still not widely used.

Smarty , a smartcard reader from Fisher International (Radlett, U.K.) that fits into and works from a PC's 3-1/2-inch floppy drive, could change this. It works without a bulky power supply, cables, and setup software.

The first large-scale project in Europe that supports Smarty smartcard readers is TeleCash's (Stuttgart) Internet payment scheme called Moneybytes. In this environment, Smarty reads the German banking as sociation's (Zentraler Kreditausschuss) electronic cash card.

With Moneybytes, TeleCash, Germany's largest electronic cash network provider, is porting its electronic payment service to the Internet, thereby deploying Brokat's (Böblingen, Germany) new Java-based PayLine payment server. Boris Anderer of Brokat says, "Smarty is an efficient means to bring a TeleCash terminal into the consumers' living rooms. Similar projects may soon run in other European countries."

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Smarty Cards

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Smarty may soon read cash cards in Germany and other countries.