Inside Contactless, a maker of RFID (redio frequency identification) products, will be servicing China's higher education institutions with their newly won bid.

Inside Contactless' Chinese partner, Beijing Global Card Technology Centre has been chosen by the Chinese Ministry of Education to supply, this year, more than 8 million pieces of INSIDE Contactless' PicoTag smart-labels for the Chinese Colleges and Universities' students.

The paper based smart-labels will be used by Chinese Students as their own personal ID cards (with their data stored on the chip) to buy their discount railway tickets. Until now, the Ministry of Railways and Education had a hard time authenticating genuine student ID cards for the purchase of discounted railway student tickets to regulate fraud. The use of the secure PicoTag chip, and its read/write communication distance, was a good solution to fight tickets' counterfeiting, fraud and to provide a strict regulation of whom the authorities sell the discounted tickets to.

"The ease-of-use and security of Inside Contactless's PicoTag paper labels make them an ideal means to host students' credentials, to better identify the label-holder and ultimately improve security", said Jason Feng, Managing Director of the Board of Beijing Global Smart Card technology Centre. "Also their products can easily be integrated by our many projects partners and suitable for current Contactless markets".

PicoTag is a state-of-the-art contactless memory chip compliant with the ISO 15693 standard, and has the ability to operate at a vicinity distance of up to 1.5 m with a long range reader and antenna. PicoTag offers an additional cryptographic security feature for data protection and chip authentication. Unique secret keys are used to protect the different applications the product is used for.

Inside Contactless' Sales Director for China, Simon Husen comments: "We are honored to have been chosen for this important application It is a proactive initiative towards multi-application for campus and secure identification for transportation discount purchases using international smartcard standard." We are confident that INSIDE's unrivalled experience in contactless technology will facilitate many such projects in China and the China Information Industry".