AuthenTec signs deal with HP's consumer division
Award-winning TruePrint finger scanners will be incorporated into a new line of consumer notebooks; deal shows company a leader in bringing biometrics into the home market; last year’s arrangement with Kwikset/Sequiam just one example
The new year is off to a good start, at least for Melbourne, Florida-based AuthenTec. The company this week, speaking at the famous Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, announced that its AES1610 fingerprint sensor — the smallest using the company’s award-winning TruePrint sensor — would form a critical part of Hewlett-Packard’s new Pavilion tx1000 Entertainment notebook personal computer. Although the TruePrint has been part of HP’s commercial line for some time, this is HP’s first consumer notebook to use the biometric system. “The move by HP signals the demand for biometrics at the consumer level,” said AuthenTec Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Scott Moody. One example: the company’s Fingerloc sensors are featured in the recently announced biometric deadbolt to be offered by a partnership between Sequiam and Kwikset.
-read more in this company news release
Company and technology brief
Unlike most fingerprint readers, TruePrint reads below the surface of the skin to the live layer, where the true fingerprint resides. This subsurface approach enables AuthenTec sensors to read virtually any fingerprint. The technology’s extreme accuracy also allows AuthenTec to create sensors that are smaller, lower cost, and perform better than larger, more costly competing solutions. As a result the company dominates the finger-biometric sensor market: seven out of ten of the world’s leading PC manufacturers use Authentec sensors, as do 95 percent of all biometric cell phone models. The company’s sensors also are used in the U.S. government’s largest biometrics implementation for the U.S. Census Bureau. In all, more than nine million of them are in use today. Last year, the Wall Street Journal awarded the company’s TruePrint finger-biometric systems the newspaper’s Technology Innovation Award for IT Security and Privacy.
