Both are open to fraud when criminals wait behind people keying in their PIN numbers or dialling in their authorisation codes for telephone charge cards. With the power turned up, the device can transmit between hands three inches apart giving the option of non-contact communication. Yaun suggests that a marketable device might look like a smart card, three or four times as thick as a standard credit card, could hold megabytes of data, and communicate them at rates of about 100 kbits per second, either by the user touching a piece of equipment or being near enough for the signal to flow. Those who worry about electricity flowing through their bodies can relax. Yaun says that IBM is already in talks with telephone companies and car makers about the technology and expects products to reach the market next year.
Car makers see an opportunity to replace keys.
The Pan would only unlock the door and start the car for somebody it recognised. It could do other things too, such as resetting seat positions, selecting the CD or radio programme of choice and setting the air conditioner to what the driver normally selects. By contrast, the paper notebook is simplicity itself, but no less useful for that. A conventional pad, with up to 100 pages, sits on a digitising tablet mounted on a clipboard-style folder. Later, when you get back to your office or home, you connect the system by a simple cable to your PC and download the contents to your word-processing package.