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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting take on the demise of Pay By Touch: Another hot new technology turns cold

US vendor Pay By Touch spent $300 million of private funding from hedge funds and venture capitalists trying to prove the business case for biometrics at the point of sale. The firm won a couple of major scalps - including the UK's Co-operative chain as a test bed - but filed for bankruptcy protection in December. Holding company Solidus Networks has been flogging the company's assets over the past couple of months and yesterday announced that it was shutting down all biometric processing for its remaining customer merchant base at midnight. "It was determined that the enterprise could no longer support the biometric authentication and payment system as it currently exists, based on lack of funding and current market conditions."

Or "drowning the puppy" as they so quaintly term it at LloydsTSB.

I remember it. In fact NeXT was aiming for a ten per cent marketshare of dealing room terminals in 1992 - behind Sun and HP, but ahead of IBM and DEC. UBS was a user reference site along with JPMorgan, although the latter pulled back after a couple of test installations failed to win over the dealing room boys.

Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and the Unix-based NeXTStep GUI became the basis for a new OS project called Rhapsody, which ultimately begat the Mac OSX that powers all new Macs from the G4 upwards.

The Smart Card Alliance has responded to the scare stories with its own FAQ on contactless payment security.

The Fintech angle comes from Apple's announcement yesterday of the software roadmap for the iPhone. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking a tilt at Blackberry's fiefdom in the enterprise space by adding support for Microsoft Windows Exchange server and Cisco VPN. Aside from that, the company has also opened up the platform to third party developers (and cunningly announced plans for iPhone App downloads via iTunes). You can bet every company operating in the mobile banking market is currently scrutinising the SDK and working up their plans to develop bank-specific Apps for future roll-out.

It's a common wheeze.

If you're looking for the financials, we posted them the week before: ACI reports quarterly loss.

For the record - and to save you the ffort of toiling through all the positive guff at the top of the release - ACI reported a net loss of $2.0 million for the quarter compared to net income of $2.6 million during the same period last year. Calendar year 2007 net loss was $13.8 million compared to net income of $42.8 million in calendar 2006.

Bad news also for Verichip, which manufactures RFID tags for body implants - a technology which has been used at a beach resort in Spain to enable sun-lovers to pay for treats on the beach without having to take their wallets out.  At the Black Hat magic show, Laurie, who has an injected RFID-tag, showed how easy it was not only to read the tag, but also to re-write the tag. During his demo, he used the coding sequence reserved for animal tagging to have his RFID chip declare him an animal.

Dissed by the yoof as the communication medium of choice for old people, and the favoured tool of spammers and phishers alike, e-mail's already old hat. What are banks doing about SMS, twitter, IM, desktop video conferencing and other modern collaboration tools? Answers on a telex, please.

Will Hutton in the FT today suggests that there are few companies in the FTSE 100 that have not in some way had their franchise today shaped, supported and helped by government action. As Hutton observes: "Claims that the public's embrace is an automatic palsy on enterprise are just ideological. Both sectors are indispensable and interdependent."

You can read the full text here.