Obama Onboard for Biometrics Spending

As we reported last month, biometrics spending worldwide is on the rise, and it looks like our new president won't be straying from the trend.

According to a recent study, President-elect Barack Obama and his administration team won't skimp when it comes to biometrics spending during their first year in office. The Stanford Group Co. research expects Obama's team to spend up to $1 billion on biometric applications, primarily in defense, intelligence and homeland security sectors. An expected $500-600 million will go to biometrics contracts, many of which were announced Tuesday, and additional intelligence programs may add another $250-350 million in expenditures.

A billion on biometrics? That's no small figure, and we look forward to tracking its development and impact in the years ahead.

Biometrics: Global Demand on the Rise

It allows you to breeze right through the grocery checkout line. It also helps the FBI keep tabs on potential terrorist activity.

Biometrics - the ability to accurately identify people by unique traits and characteristics - has a tremendous range of public and private value, and the technology has been a critical tool to government agencies worldwide for quite some time. Thus, we're not surprised to hear that global demand is increasing.

According to Investor's Business Daily, the demand for biometrics hardware and software is expanding in light of high-level homeland security measures, border control and requirements for other government intelligence operations. The private sector is expanding as well. It looks like biometric technology is recession-proof: the International Biometric Group reports that the global biometrics market is expected to grow from $3.4 billion to $9.4 billion between 2009 and 2014.

Right now, fingerprint scanning is the biometric tool of choice for government agencies – the Department of Homeland Security's database alone holds 90 million sets of fingerprints. That said, global interest in face recognition is up; while fingerprint technology holds first place, face recognition is expected to be the second biggest revenue growth area in the biometrics industry in 2009, followed by iris scanning.

Cameras are Good, Apps are Better

With the upcoming Beijing Olympics promising some of the most stringent security measures since the Spartans were in charge, Frost & Sullivan has been taking a look at China. No surprise, the video surveillance camera sector is exploding with Chinese camera expenditures expected to double over the next few years.

New analysis from the consulting firm, Chinese Video Surveillance Camera Markets, finds that the market earned revenues of $213.8 million in 2006 and estimates this to reach $484.3 million in 2013.

The news isn’t all good, however. The report also highlights the challenges facing camera manufacturers despite this growth. These include narrow margins due to high competition and dependency on big suppliers for chips and sensors, which affects production capacity utilization. That’s really true all over…much better to build security applications, I think, than cameras these days. In addition to avoiding the “squeeze” faced by hardware manufactures today, as new application technologies disrupt stagnant hardware markets…even create new ones…we should see health growth AND margins for foreseeable future.