Voicekey wins contract from UK government concerning development of new m-commerce platform

Voicekey, a developer of biometric security solutions, has been awarded a commercial contract from the United Kingdom’s Technology Strategy Board. The contract represents the second phase of a mobile commerce initiative in the United Kingdom. During the first phase, Voicekey was able to introduce new technologies and security features to the mobile space. The second phase will focus on the development of a market-ready mobile commerce solution that will be easily accessible to consumers as well as secure.

UK consumers are becoming more interested in comprehensive m-commerce services and platforms

Consumers throughout the United Kingdom have become very interested in the concept of mobile payments and purchasing products from merchants using only their mobile devices. Many consumers have encountered troubling problems with the mobile commerce platforms that they use on a regular basis, however. Lackluster security has put consumer’s financial information at risk of exploitation and poorly designed platforms have created an unfavorable experience for many people. The demand for easy to use, well developed, and secure platforms has been on the rise.

Merchants and consumers are somewhat reluctant to engage in the mobile commerce space

Voicekey aims to address that merchants and consumers have when it comes to mobile commerce. For consumers, accessibility has become a serious issue. Many platforms make use of NFC technology, but few people actually have the NFC-enabled mobile devices needed to use these platforms. For merchants, security is a major issue. Merchants are also somewhat uncertain about the potential revenue growth they could see by engaging mobile consumers more aggressively.

Platform expected to be equipped with biometric security technology but will not be based on NFC technology

Voicekey is expected to develop a platform that will address many of these issues. The platform is likely to make use of the company’s biometric security technology, alleviating some of the security concerns that merchants and consumers have. The platform is also expected to be more accessible to consumers without NFC-enabled devices. The platform may use NFC to some extent, but it will not be entirely based upon the technology.

This recent news development will bring the latter company’s platform to a close on March 30.

In a recent news posting on the Distill website, it has announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo, in a move that many in the industry are assuming that has a great deal more to do with obtaining the mobile marketing talent from that company anything much else.

The platform for the company will remain fully operational through March 30.

The Distill service had been in a private beta phase and had been working with companies such as Box and Disney. Now, Yahoo has purchased this startup, which has come up with a collaborative system based on video, which is targeted at hiring technical talent. However, instead of putting that approach to use for drawing their own engineers, Yahoo plans to shut down the company altogether and simply hire the leading engineers who worked there in order to work on mobile marketing development.

The terms of this acquisition (which is also seen as a mobile marketing deal) have not yet been released.

About five months ago, Distill had just finished securing investments worth $1.3 million and had developed and created a system that made it possible for a potential new hire, such as an engineer, to be interviewed through a video conversation comparable to Skype. What made it stand out from a standard video conversation is that it could provide programming challenges to the candidate during the interview, itself.

Therefore if the interviewee was, for example, a graphic designer, then the video interview would be able to include a collaborative walk through of a portfolio so that its contents could then be discussed.

As the interview can be scheduled online and the prospect is sent a direct link in order to “meet” with the prospective employer, there is no need for exchanging user names or other contact details.

The engineers from Distill, who will now be working for the purpose of mobile marketing at Yahoo, have also worked on other major projects such as Tapjoy, which is a smartphone ad platform that is performance based.