Authentec win Wall Street Journal innovation award

Financial success is always a good technology company’s raison d’etre, but for the scientists and engineers slaving away in the labs, recognition of a job well done can do loads to improve employee morale and confidence. Pointy heads at AuthenTec must be a bit swollen this week after the Wall Street Journal awarded the company’s TruePrint finger-biometric systems the newspaper’s Technology Innovation Award for IT Security and Privacy. Over 600 companies competed for the award, which was given based on whether the innovation represented a breakthrough from conventional ideas or methods in its field, and whether the innovation goes beyond incremental improvements on technologies that already exist, among other criteria. We have often reported on the company’s success in selling the product and are pleased to see other outside observers giving similar praise.

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.

-read more in this company news release