Here at Mobbeel, we are really glad to announce that we have won the first Emergent Authentication Challenge, sponsored by Emergent Consulting. The competition was looking for the most robust concept for a mobile authentication technology solution and the prize is going to be really helpful to boost our development, $10,000!

We presented one of our star products, MobbID. This solution consists on a state-of-the-art multi-biometric security platform that reliably and securely verifies the identity of mobile phone users by using their unique features, alone or in combination i.e. iris, voice, face, signature, hand geometry.

The judging process took various reviews from individuals, startups and subject matter experts from all over the World. Judges determined that the flexibility of the technology from multiple authentication sources, its ability to use existing smartphone technology and its potential in the marketplace gave it the edge in a very demanding pool of entries. This faith placed on us make us really proud of our job and give us strength to keep working harder than ever to create the best possible mobile authentication solutions for our clients.

The Emergent Authentication Challenge received entries from at least 20 different countries, reflecting the importance of this award. So we also want to congratulate the other 9 finalists for their admirable work and effort, any of them might have won this award: Tento Technologies (United Kingdom); Entrupy Inc. (United States); M2010 (Slovenia); I Think Security Ltd. (Canada); Claudia Nickel & Christoph Busch (Germany); Bionym Inc. (Canada); LoginWall (Israel); and, In-Webo Technologies (France).

President of Emergent Consulting Richard Walters said, “I was very impressed with the broad range of entries that were proposed to our Challenge. Mobbeel’s solution captured the objective of the competition and we hope that our prize will go, in some way, to achieving their future success.”

In response to these words, our CEO José Luis Huertas said, “We want to thank Emergent Consulting for sponsoring the challenge and the trust they have placed on our solution and also to Innocentive for a great organization and support team. We are incredibly excited to have won this challenge because it confirms we are creating a great solution that has the potential to solve many of the security problems that our clients are currently facing. We hope this award is just the beginning of a successful long-term relationship and we are really looking forward to exploring the synergies both with Emergent Consulting and other participants”.

More Information

About Emergent Consulting

Emergent Consulting provides consulting services across the globe as part of the Emergent, LLC corporate structure. Emergent Consulting provides comprehensive support and expertise in a core group of technology solutions including Identity, Security, Open Source and Cloud Computing. For more information visit their web.

Mobbeel is proud of participating along with Caceres City Council on the Garage 2.0 Biometric security project. Moreover, we apreciate the City Council’s firm commitment to innovation and development as the way forward.

The project consists of adding a biometric access control system to six rooms of the Garage 2.0 Innovation Factory.

That access control is based on the use of smartphones and biometric recognition technology developed by Mobbeel that allows to identify people from unique features, such as iris or handwritten signature. The system verifies the identity of the Garage 2.0 users, and in case of being authorized, it allows the access to the rooms that are part of the project.

How does it work?
Once the project is over, The Garage 2.0 users can access to the rooms that they have been authorized to, using their smartphone as if it were a key. They only need to get closer to the room they want to access. Once there and using the application specially designed for smartphones, the user verifies its identity. Furthermore, If the system checks that the user have access to that room, the smartphone will securely and wirelessly communicate with the door and allow access.

There are several advantages:

No more keys, now you are the key.
The need of physical distribution of keys is removed. If the Garage 2.0 user has an smartphone supported by the system, he can use it to access to the rooms in which has been authorized.In case of not having a supported device, Garage 2.0 will make available several supported terminals to the users.

Even if the smartphone is stolen or lost, no one without authorization can access to that rooms thanks to the biometric recognition technology.

Three levels of security
- Something you only know: the specific access code of the room you want to access.
- Something you only own: the mobile device with the access application installed.
- Something you only are: You only have access to the room through your iris or your handwritten signature.

Related news:
‘Hoy’ newspaper
‘El periódico de Extremadura’ newspaper

“Science is built upon approaches that gradually come closer to the truth.” Isaac Asimov.

In 1879, Alphonse Berthillon, head of the French police photography department, suggested that people could be identified by precise physical measurements.
His system was based on measuring certain lengths and widths of the head and the body, as well as recording individual marks like tattoos or scars.
This system was quickly adopted widely by American and British police forces until system failures began to appear, the main problems with measuring changes. From that time onwards, western police forces started using fingerprinting to identify criminals.
In recent years, biometrics has grown from just using a fingerprint, to employing many different identification methods that fall into two broad categories: physiology and behavior.

Physiological biometrics is based on measuring the individual’s unique physical characteristics, such as fingerprint details, patterns of retina veins, iris characteristics or the size and shape of the hand.

Behavioral biometrics identifies unique learning characteristics, such as signature, keystrokes or voice recognition, which compares frequencies and vocal patterns to identify the speaker.


ID cards, PINs and passwords do not actually identify a person, as the owner may transfer any of these identifications to another person. Only biometric readers identify people by unique and unchanging characteristics.
If someone steals or guesses your password, the thief could access your information without difficulty, but to impersonate you using your biometric profile, although not impossible, is much harder.
We can prove the low reliability of traditional identification methods through iSpy. This is a software package that captures what is written on the cellphone at a distance of 3 to 60 meters. The goal of North Carolina University researchers who have developed iSpy was to check whether the use of cellphones in public places could be a risk. The software succeeds in 90% of the cases identifying which keys the user is pressing.

To solve this security issue, biometrics industry continues innovating and researching for new biometric methods to identify people such as body odor, ear structure or brain electromagnetic signals.
One of the most advanced techniques with great potential due to its simplicity is vascular biometrics. This technique studies the thickness and distance between the veins that lie under our skin. As this is an internal standard, it leaves no trace, providing a high level of security. We can have this technology in our cellphones sooner than we thought.

Unlike laptops, which we sometimes leave at home or in the office, mobiles are always with us wherever we stay, wherever we go. This fact awakens the interest of thieves, who are attracted by device price-size relationship, but if we think carefully, the information it contains can be worth much more. A survey performed by GetSafeOnline.org says that smartphone ‘malware’ has increased by 800% in just 4 months.
For this reason, biometrics will pass in a not-so-distant future from being ‘an interesting concept’ to be ‘a need’ in all smartphones.

ABI Research suggests in a recent survey that people are feeling more comfortable using biometric security, which could result in a $3 billion spending increase in biometrics over the next five years. Supporting this prediction, we find cases such as India, which will pass from recognizing their people through their membership to a group, according to their caste, tribe or religion, to identifying all its citizens trough iris recognition. On the other hand, Isabelle Moeller of the Biometrics Institute, considers that ‘Public acceptance of biometrics has been slow to grow, and will continue to be an issue until issues of privacy and security of data have been brought up to a level acceptable by the majority of people’.

Another survey done by Goode Intelligence about mobile biometrics foresees an increase from 4 million mobile biometric users that exist in 2011 to 39 million in 2015.
The survey also details how biometrics will work on cellphones, focusing on device protection, e-commerce security, NFC security and replacement of PINs and passwords. According to the survey, fingerprint sensors and voice recognition technology will be the first to appear.

Jose Luis Huertas, CEO at Mobbeel, a company based on the creation of biometric solutions for smartphones, gives us his opinion about these facts. ‘Every day we perform more transactions with our smartphones and we store more and more both personal and professional private information. Until now, we could only protect that information with a large amount of forgettable passwords. Furthermore, it is difficult to type long and complex passwords with a tiny smartphone keyboard, so we finally preferred to use passwords which are easy to remember and to type in exchange for losing security. Biometrics is the solution to combine security and comfort and soon all of us will have a high level of security without having to remember anything, anytime, anywhere’.