ASK Selected by ERG as Preferred Supplier of Contactless Smart Cards; ASK Acquires Motorola Manufacturing Assets, License for Contactless Smart Cards.Business Editors NICE, France--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 15, 2001 ASK S.A., a world leader in dual interface contactless smart cards, announced today that the ERG Group ERG Group is an Australia-based technology company that specialises in smart card systems and applications. It has been involved in projects around the world, including Hong Kong's Octopus card system[1], San Francisco's TransLink system[2] has selected them as the preferred supplier for transit applications. ASK also announced the acquisition of the manufacturing assets for the Venus contactless smart cards developed by Motorola, along with an unrestricted production license, in a three-way transaction between ERG, Motorola and ASK. Details of the transaction were not announced. "The realignment re·a·lign tr.v. re·a·ligned, re·a·lign·ing, re·a·ligns 1. To put back into proper order or alignment. 2. To make new groupings of or working arrangements between. of strategy at Motorola and the ERG Group in the global Automated Fare Collection market created this opportunity for us," said Bruno Moreau, deputy general manager for ASK. "We want to step in and take over where Motorola left off, and the first order of business is to put in place a stable and reliable manufacturing capability for Venus smart card products. We are optimistic that this will help us to better serve our current and future clients, and it will stimulate the growth of the contactless smart card industry as a whole." The Venus technology is an operating system embedded The Operating System Embedded (mostly known under the acronym OSE) is a real-time embedded operating system created by the Swedish firm ENEA. Bengt Eliasson, who at the time was a consultant from Ericsson, wrote the basic parts of the kernel. on the chip of a smart card. Like the other products of ASK, it is focused on high-speed contactless smart card transactions for Automated Fare Collection applications in transit systems. ERG transit projects such as San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden , Rome and Manchester currently use the Venus technology. ASK will continue to manufacture and market its existing line of contactless card products for transit. The company will also capitalize on Cap´i`tal`ize on` v. t. 1. To turn (an opportunity) to one's advantage; to take advantage of (a situation); to profit from; as, to capitalize on an opponent's mistakes s>. their know-how to create a new generation Venus card that provides a migration path going forward for customers using this technology. To complete this transaction, the ERG Group acquired a license to Motorola's Venus platform smart card technology along with the plant and equipment needed for the manufacture of Venus smart cards Example of widely used contactless smart cards are Hong Kong's Octopus card, Paris' Calypso/Navigo card and Lisbon' LisboaViva card, which predate the ISO/IEC 14443 standard. The following tables list smart cards used for public transportation and other electronic purse applications. . ERG in turn sold the manufacturing plant and equipment to ASK and granted ASK a non-exclusive sublicense to the Venus technology. About ASK S.A. Founded in 1997, ASK is today a world leader in the design, development, marketing and manufacturing of dual interface contactless smart cards. The international smart card community recently recognized the company's unique contactless paper technology for disposable ticketing at the Cartes 2001 card show in Paris, when ASK won two prestigious 2001 SESAME awards -- Best Application and Best Transport Application. ASK has already supplied more than 7 million contactless cards and paper contactless tickets that are in operation in more than 35 cities in Europe, Asia and America. Clients include SNCF SNCF Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (French National Railways) SNCF Sans Nous les Cafés Ferment (French) and RATP RATP Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens RATP Reliable Asynchronous Transfer Protocol RATP Reste Assis T'es Payé RATP Rentre Avec Tes Pieds RATP Random Anti Terrorist Program in Paris; transit operators in Lisbon, Lyon, Venice, Naples, Taipei and Nice; and BMS BMS abbr. Bachelor of Marine Science , a project in France sponsored jointly by the financial services and transport industries. The ASK manufacturing and personalization operations are near Nice in Sophia Antipolis, France with commercial offices in Paris and Hong Kong. |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion