Apex Business Communications is a small company which provides professional writing services to companies in the Orange County area. The products they offer include technical writing (manuals and on-line help), Web content (although they do not specialize in Web design), white papers, data sheets, brochures and similar types of publications. They have an established clientele, and also work with new customers on occasion. For this assignment, I worked on two projects with Ethentica, a company which is relatively new and whose ownership is complicated (Ethentica is owned by XL Vision which, in turn, is owned by Safeguard Scientifics, a publicly traded company).
Ethentica (formerly Who?Vision) has two different product lines. The first is software-based and focuses on providing secure Web transactions for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications. Ethentica is not the first company which has attempted to provide this type of security, but it has taken a cutting edge approach to the technology and is now attempting to introduce that product to the market. The Ethentica approach moves beyond the public key infrastructure (PKI) to the management of private keys, and does so across several different repositories, leading to a higher level of security which is more difficult to subvert than traditional security systems.
The other product line focuses on providing security for computing devices (primarily laptops and personal computers, although the potential exists to extend that to cellular phones, palm devices and similar technology), This product uses a fingerprint sensor to read the fingerprint of an authorize user (enrollment) and then compare future fingerprints against authorized prints. Recognizing that American export laws would prevent exporting a one-to-many match (where the actual fingerprint is identified with a specific individual), Ethentica chose to use an algorithm whereby data is extracted...