Interview with Jörg Heuer, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories

Of Deutsche laboratories. There is talk here at EIC of the telephone, the mobile telephone, actually being the identity device of the future. Since everyone carries one around with it. Do you agree? Absolutely. When it comes to what is it that the end user will always help with it, with it, him? What is it that can also provide security to other processes need to provide security, to ensure entitlements of all these things? I would not say that the identity kind of lives in that device. Big part of it are still at home in the networks.

Corporate networks have their own ideas of what an identity is and the payment provider has own ideas about that. But as a mediator, the mobile phone is ideal because everybody has one. We have the necessary capabilities built into it. And our idea is to make these capabilities a valuable to just about anyone who wants to provide instruments or wants to use instruments of identity. And I recently left my telephone, my mobile phone on the back seat of a taxi. Does that mean I would be essentially without identity faceless? I don't hope so.

I mean, hopefully still your friends will recognize you when you ask them for some money because you lost years. It will not be much different from what happens to you when you lose your leather wallet today, actually from a risk management point of view, it gets much better because I hope you configured your phone in a way that a pin must be used in order to use it. At least after a few minutes of its latest Used, That will protect your wallet as well. The wallet itself will have its own protection mechanism. You might have to have a pin or whatever.

We're also looking forwards to biometrics actually. And then every card in that model, every instrument in that wallet will have the authentication security instruments built into it that the issuer decided to. So whatever they agreed with you as the end customer will be an effect. And if you got a pre page card in it that is used for easy one tab and pay it for the coffee, then this might be Ausable when it's found, but only up to the amount that you have prepaid. So it's always a negotiation mechanism that is between the issuer and you, and there's a lot of established mechanisms.

I think that we all understand that we don't leave cash money lying around like that. You demoed today at EIC, the electronic wallet on the mobile phone, but it's still very much in the lab stage. When do you think it will actually become a product that we can use?

Well, as you said, it's very much in the lab state. It's by far less in the lab state than it was last year, we presented the model last year and the beginning of this year, our board member for products and innovation technology presented and announced that we will release that product. It looks different from what we imagined it to be. It does not have all the functionality that we R and D guys have thought it should have, but it's the first step. It's the clear commitment of tele to go that way for.

And I must also say that after the first reluctant movements in our company, to accept all these ideas about the open platform approach that we have behind put behind the, these ideas have gotten more and more into the heads of people. It becomes clearer and clearer that by fencing in certain functionalities, we'll probably rather scare away the customers.

And by opening up, we make the instrument more interest and we want to open it up so much that the whole identity community from making use of it, of course, we need to earn a bit money with it, but I really do believe that by making many people adopted, we make it much more useful than for just a specific reason. Okay. Hopefully by EIC 2012, we will have more to talk about or maybe even to see and use. Thanks very much Confident. Thank you so much.