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[garth] 07/3/2006 13:10

London TfL ITSO pilot scheme running until the end of March:

Based on the Department for Transport's 2002 'Route Map', the
strategy for delivering Oyster ITSO interoperability in London, this
pilot is part of a series of work packages that will demonstrate the
ability to operate ITSO capable Oyster equipment.

This pilot was devised by the Department for Transport (DfT) and
implemented with the support of the Department for Education
and Skills (DfES) and Transport for London. To prove the reality
behind the objective of ITSO-Oyster interoperability, the DfT
commissioned Cubic to operate a service that allows Connexions
Card holders, with valid entitlements to travel, to use the London
Bus pilot services. The ITSO-enabled Connexions Cards themselves
are issued and managed by Capita on behalf of the DfES.......

Cubic envisages that the Connexions Card pilot will be the first of
several similar trials, proving for example different types of
devices, on various modes of transport. Ultimately, Cubic expects
that this, and other pilots, will be the pre-cursors to the rollout of
ITSO compliant equipment across TfL's Oyster network.

Cubic is the world's largest specialist automatic fare collection
system provider and works with EDS in the TranSys consortium that
designed, developed and runs London's Oyster smart card and
fare collection system. This system, a success story in its own right,
has now provided the platform for one of the country's largest
ITSO pilots.

[garth] 07/3/2006 11:04

Cheshire's First Travel set to convert in early 2006:

Latest News


03/10/2005 NEW TICKET MACHINES WILL MAKE CUSTOMER'S LIVES EASIER

From Monday 3 October 2005 following the introduction of new ticket machines, customers on First's services in Chester, Ellesmere Port and throughout Wirral will be issued with improved design bus tickets and be able to benefit from full smartcard capability.

Cheshire County Council (CCC) and First have been working closely over recent months on opportunities to develop the success of the CCC multi-operator TravelCard smartcard scheme, originally launched in July 2002. In order to successfully take the TravelCard to the next stage of its development, and to meet First's aspirations, a new machine was required. This need has been fulfilled by 'Optima', a new ticket machine developed by the UK's leading transport revenue control system supplier, Almex Information Systems.

"The Cheshire TravelCard scheme is the only successful commercial multi-operator smartcard ticketing scheme in the country," observed Paul De Santis, First's local commercial director, "and we are delighted to be involved in this initiative to develop it further."

The First/Cheshire project has been possible after CCC's successful funding bid to the Department for Transport, in January 2004. First will install 150 Optimas across its three depots in the Chester and Wirral operating area and these will provide passengers with easy-to-read, clearer layout tickets which will be beneficial for those customers who may not have good vision. Additionally, they are more user friendly for drivers, and their advanced smartcard technology will enable First to provide a more flexible ticket range and other benefits. Optima opens up the possibilities, at a later date, of introducing more customer incentives and travel promotions, particularly for regular users.

CCC and its bus operator partners expect to convert to the new national standard for transport smartcards: ITSO (Integrated Transport Smartcard Organisation), early in 2006.

This new standard will provide a framework for expansion of the CCC TravelCard scheme, both geographically within Cheshire and with neighbouring schemes. The Almex Optima will allow the Cheshire TravelCard scheme to migrate to this new standard.

Helen Mitchell, TravelCard Development Officer for Cheshire County Council said: "The implementation of the new Optima ticket machines into First's Chester and Wirral operations will allow CCC and First to jointly showcase the new national ITSO standard. The Optimas will provide a much improved customer interface and enable a greater range of both commercial and smartcard products."

[garth] 07/3/2006 10:57

Cheshire looking to extend its ITSO scheme:

See: "Smartcard ticketing" section.

[garth] 07/3/2006 10:52

Questions in the House last month suggestive that where the Scottish Executive and the Welsh Assembly have gone others will follow? Department of Transport pushing interoperability via its own emerging standard: ITSO, with the ISAM provided by Ecebs.......


15 Feb 2006 : Column 2052W-continued

Greater Manchester (Smartcards)
Andrew Gwynne: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what discussions his Department has had with Greater Manchester bus, rail and tram operators and the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive on the introduction of smartcard technology for pre-travel payment on public transport in the county. [51142]

Dr. Ladyman: There was correspondence in December 2003 between the Department and Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority about the planned introduction of smartcards in Greater Manchester. This correspondence related to the ITSO specification for an interoperable ticketing interface for smartcards in travel.

Officials have had informal discussions with Greater Manchester PTE on a number of occasions about the proposed Readycard smartcard scheme, also in the context of the ITSO standard. Officials also attended a GMPTE ITSO workshop last year.

[garth] 06/3/2006 12:12

Added to the header:



The more I read the more I like.

DYOR.

G.

[garth] 03/3/2006 12:26

From the ITSO website re. TFL

ITSO announce SAM versions for both 5V and 3V application

ITSO has announced that its Secure Access Module developed by Atmel, Ecebs, and Sagem will be available as a 5V version as well as 3V "This enables smooth integration of existing infrastructure such as Transport for London towards an ITSO compliant scheme" said Peter Stoddart." We can now meet the transport industry's needs for securely performing and storing thousands of high speed transactions while being fully backward compatible with the installed base of ticketing equipment."

"The ITSO SAM is a ground breaking application of our high performance high capacity Multefile ultra rapid application technology," said Barry Hochfield, Ecebs Technical Director. "In developing the hardware and software for the ITSO SAM, we've come up with what is essentially the industry's first production worthy 4 Megabyte Smart Card."

"Sagem's unique packaging technology developed by its Smart Card Department was key to the viability of the ITSO SAM," said Jean-Paul Jainsky, Sagem's Security Division Managing Director. "In being able to assemble such components in a SIM format card, we've opened the door to very smart ticketing and payment application design".

Ian Duthie, Atmel's Smart Card Marketing Manager, commented, "This innovative application really makes our new AT90SC3232CS Secure Flash Microcontroller shine. With 7816 ports running at over 400Kb/s, 300 DES transactions/ second, the addition of an SPI port enabling a 4 Mbyte memory expansion of secure data, encrypted by the '3232CS' and stored on Atmel's AT45DB321B 32M-bit Data Flash, makes an outstanding product offering of a 4M Smart Card in a standard SIM format. The close co-operation between Atmel, Ecebs and Sagem has resulted in a unique product in terms of Smart Card performance, density and security."

[garth] 03/3/2006 12:12

And an interesting insight into ITSO. Excerpt only:


"Smart Economy, Smart Transport"

by Jeremy Acklam, Virgin Trains
(11th February 2002)


Smartcard markets worldwide are now taking off and there is a growing demand for working together to avoid fragmentation and lack of compatibility between different schemes. A room full of forward thinkers met in a number of cities around the UK in 1998 and 2000 and created an interoperable national smartcard specification. A nonprofit company was created to manage and develop the specification on behalf of the Crown, who own it.

Supported by 85% of transport operators in the UK, the DTLR and many of the world's premier smartcard suppliers, ITSO has completed revision 2 of the specification and is on track to have the first equipment delivered this summer and smartcards capable of interoperability in customers' hands in 2003.

From this joint vision of capabilities and features, we have the best chance for a long while to create a step change in customer service to Transport Customers, whilst also springboarding e-Government and private schemes alike without compromising the unique requirements of each. To achieve this, there are, of course, some challenges.

The specification is owned by the Crown, is Open and publicly available and the initial focus of the ITSO has been to deliver a specification that enables everyone to work together to improve public transport ticketing using contactless smartcards. Without such a framework of public and private interested parties, smartcard systems will not be able to talk to each other, nor will there be an open and inclusive marketplace.

The question on the screen here is the link back to the GSM mobile phone specification - the ITSO is the smartcard equivalent of the European Institute that created the GSM specification and made it the leader. ITSO, now in combination with its European equivalent, will do the same for transport smartcards.

Because ITSO is an enabling specification across which many different data payloads can be delivered, it may allow more effective implementation of the smart economy in general, particularly with multi-application smartcards.

If Government would not consider supporting multiple incompatible mobile phone specifications, then presumably it would not support multiple incompatible smartcard specifications?

ITSO is a national framework of minimum standards.

It is a managed specification that gives local authorities and transport operators confidence in procurement and is intended to reduce lead times and costs. The commercial agreements possible are not restricted by the specification and it is expected to become a nationally recognised symbol.

ITSO is intended to protect the long term - as European standards become mandatory over the longer term, the UK can implement the ITSO specification now knowing that it will comply with Europe in future, because The DTLR is firmly at the heart of European smartcard development.

The specification is also designed around giving choice to the customer - choice of card provider, of retailers, transport operators, products and payments.

If Transport Operators are to compete, they must become the new Urban Brands, focused on Customers, catering to a host of daily needs for an urban population on the move, vying for their loyalty.

Further to my earlier slide of thetrainline.com and its move into interactive television and ticket on departure collection - without smartcards as the fulfillment mechanism for fee collection and ticketing, the new technology channels will never be able to satisfy the high volume areas of the market like season ticketing and regional travel. For these, it is essential that customers can renew or complete their booking and payment transaction by smartcard through the set top box on digital TV, through their home computer, mobile telephone or digital assistant. I anticipate that by 2005 it will also be possible to conduct the transaction via a regular home telephone handset - therefore including large sections of the community who otherwise might be late adopters of this technology.

One area where Smart Transport and the Smart Economy are already linking up is in the Department for Education & Skills' Connexions programme for 16 to 19 year olds which helps them stay in learning by boosting motivation - giving rewards for attendance, participation and achievement, with retail and transport discounts and in the future the capability of using the same card for transport, using the ITSO specification.

Perhaps the most difficult issue to be addressed with smartcards is the question of the availability of personal data on the card to whoever may accept it. Most customers appear to take the view that personal data on smartcards should only be there at the discretion of the customer.

The nature of the choice over personal data is important - many potential applications require access to personal data of one form or another - one clearly cannot have an anonymous driving license for instance. Nonetheless, the separation of personal data between applications can be achieved by having a unique de-personalised identification code on the card which the customer may then elect to assign to their customer data stored with the supplier of the particular service. Therefore other unrelated service providers may not get access to the data provided by the customer and the data itself only exists at the service provider, not on the card - which therefore becomes unidentifiable to anyone else if lost or used fraudulently.

Part of the security data stored on the card to verify its use could be a fingerprint record, but again this would not be linked with personal data without the customer's permission. Let me give you an example. A depersonalised card with a finger print record as described is presented for season ticket renewal. A fingerprint reader verifies that this is the card owner and the ID locates the customer record with the retailer, identifying the owner and completing the transaction. Later the same card is used to pay for a bus journey - but the bus company cannot identify the owner of the card.

How might the 'up-front' secure checking of identity be done in future? On the one hand to capture a photograph, physical signature and biometric (whether fingerprint or iris scan) will need presence in person - as one might do for a driving licence application which could be done at the Post Office, capturing the fingerprint data on site and the handing over of a photograph. Joint data capture for the delivery of e-Government will deliver big productivity gains for all.

The key to making this work is the will to endorse this single id number.

There would not be any necessity to carry cards, only to use them when claiming in the same way that it would be necessary to have the card to use it for transportation.

If we combine driving and travel then we gain over 80% coverage of those 16 and over. By linking allocation of the id number to secure identity checking we can really ensure the number allocation is unique.

The success of introducing transport cards and integrated transport policy is dependent on ensuring that these can be read across a whole infrastructure.

In turn, it would be very cost-effective and commercially attractive to be able to use the same specification for smart card readers that provided the facilities for identity across a far wider community - and also to be able to capture the base data (and maintain it) without many-fold duplication that would in itself lead to inconsistencies

The DVLA will soon have fully secure identity checks in place and could provide a platform to underpin indentity management, using the ITSO specification for the card and terminals.

To reiterate - for this is an important point - the central databases could be used to assure id uniqueness and security of identity - but the smartcard does not need to carry any personal data except the ID necessary to authenticate.

By taking this approach, there could be very little Data Protection Act impact and no accumulation on the card of a personal 'folio' of data.

Production of the card would be under the control of the individual - hence the cards should be classed as "personal privacy" cards - to ensure against theft of identity or 'behind the scenes' cross-referencing by database holders.

Transport for London will be one of the first to implement smartcards in the UK. Because they started early, they will not be compatible with the rest of the country using the ITSO specification. Action needs to be taken in the coming months to develop a roadmap for the London Prestige Project to be compatible with ITSO, which in principle is not in question as when the contract was let all parties agreed that it would migrate to international standards. The present position where a tourist could in future buy a transport smartcard and products to take them from Gatwick airport to Stratford upon Avon, access sites of historical interest and pay for sundries using the card, but could not cross London, must be addressed.

By utilising the work completed by ITSO in the wider context of creating the Smart Economy, it will therefore be possible to reduce the overall capital costs and timescales whilst at the same time ensuring a specification for card acceptance at a very wide range of locations and to avoid the scenario where citizens have smartcards, but they do not interoperate, each have a single purpose and we all have a wallet full of them. The opportunity to stop that happening is here today.

To conclude then, the challenges regarding smartcards are as follows. Firstly the need for e-Government to adopt a framework of minimum standards in partnership with transport and privately created schemes (including Transport for London) and secondly that the framework that will be required for implementing smartcards should be delivered through a nonprofit business association where Government, Local Authority and Private companies can collaborate on the basics, but can then diversify and create greater choice for customers but without the additional costs of multiple incompatible specifications.

This partnership approach has already been shown to work with the ITSO.

The transport operators of the UK are ready to discuss the implementation of these visions of multi-mode integrated information and smartcard ticketing by 2005. Without these, modal shift towards public transport will be difficult to achieve in large numbers.

Both the implementation of smartcard ticketing and integrated information can be achieved as a partnership between public and private sectors at the core of a wider Smart Economy. Implementation of smartcards in the wider economy should also be possible in similar timescales with widespread use of electronic money after 2005.

[garth] 03/3/2006 12:02

Old piece Re. Oyster and wider transport applications. Shows the issues and the potential should ITSO extend its reach....

The Department of Transport admits that the London Underground system is not compatible with standards being developed by the Integrated Transport Smartcard Organisation (ITSO).

"It is true that London is not using the ITSO standard but that is because the contracts for the specification and supply of the London card scheme were placed before work on the ITSO standard was completed," said a spokesman for the Department of Transport.

All parties are "jointly working on a study to see how London and the rest of the UK can be made interoperable", he said.......

"Eventually London Underground has to be integrated with other rail and transport systems but it is unlikely to change in the short term."

ITSO is hoping its specification will be used to develop a smart card with far wider uses than just transport.

"The ultimate dream is to replace all the cards in your wallet and have a card that can be used on transport systems and pay your poll tax," said ITSO's general manager Peter Stoddard.

"The ITSO specification would allow that. It was born out of transport but could be used on a much wider front and there has been a lot of interest around the world."




If ITSO were to be extended that means more ISAMs.....

[jimbaloo] 01/3/2006 11:56

Yep. They list them in their top 100 growth companies at number 50

[garth] 28/2/2006 17:29

Small tick-up today on 100K purchased....

[garth] 28/2/2006 11:58

WJ,

I have to say that I agree with you. I'd love to know what the justification is for such a rapid rate of growth from 07->08.......

Emailed them over a week ago. No response. They must be very busy ;0)

G.

[wjccghcc] 28/2/2006 11:25

I can believe 2006. The 2008 figure does seem very pie in the sky at the moment.

[garth] 28/2/2006 11:04

Pre-IPO broker forecasts for operating profit SMRT:

2004 £101K (actual)
2005 £153K (actual)
2006 £300K (predicted)
2007 £701K (predicted)
2008 £3.025M (predicted)

10-bagger over the next 3 years in the making or pie-in-the-sky?

[garth] 25/2/2006 08:07

Pre-IPO prospectus available free from the company broker in pdf:



Registration needed - free & minimal information taken.

G.

[garth] 24/2/2006 15:05

Link to eCEBS Customers/partner added to header. List under compilation.

[ptmoorgatehall] 24/2/2006 14:31

Many Thanks.
Garth

[garth] 24/2/2006 11:28

I haven't seen it but I believe it placed SMRT in the top 50 UK growth stocks.

[ptmoorgatehall] 24/2/2006 11:10

Hi,
I understand there is an article in shares magazine about this company.
Has anyone seen it?

[ptmoorgatehall] 24/2/2006 11:09

Hi,
I understand there is an article in shares magazine about this company.
Has anyone seen it?

[garth] 23/2/2006 06:18

Knowing,

for most of the day it was 2.75/3.75 being quoted but you could deal well within that spread.

G.