Card, mobile credential, payment and security
With new printing upgrades at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, students and staff will now only see their own print jobs at campus printing stations. The new security features will require university students and staff to sign in using their “onyen” and password at Information Technology Services printing stations.
Onyen, an acronym for the “only name you’ll ever need,” is what UNC calls its campus-wide identifier that is used to gain access to various electronic resources on campus.
The new features will also protect students from others using their accounts to pay for print jobs. For example, if a student fails to log out at a print station, no one else will be able to use his account to pay for documents, since only his own print jobs are viewable.
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States, counties and cities aren’t the only ones going after stimulus dollars. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has submitted 30 proposals for grants totaling more than $30 million for projects including increasing security on campus with more lighting and providing electronic card access to 10 buildings. Statewide, University of Tennessee system campuses have submitted 275 proposals totaling more than $330 million.
These are “projects that would make our campus more energy efficient, upgrade student and faculty computer technology and add to our ability to serve at-risk students in the Chattanooga community,” said University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Chancellor Roger Brown.
Ithaca, N.Y.-based the CBORD Group, which provides campus cards, access control and food service solutions to universities and other industries, plans to move its Farmington, N.Y. training facility to Duluth, Ga. near Atlanta to make its training operations more easily accessible for its more than 6,000 clients.
Additionally, the new facility will provide a blended learning approach supporting both classroom teaching and online learning capabilities.
The new training facility will be shared with CBORD’s sister company, Horizon Software International, a provider of software and services to the K-12, healthcare, and military markets.
CBORD’s upgrade and investment in this new training facility stems from client-driven feedback. Users say it is sometimes difficult to get to the New York client education center. Duluth is just 27 miles from Atlanta, which hosts Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport that serves more than 25 airlines.
CBORD’s new facility will provide education on CBORD’s campus and cashless card systems, food and nutrition service management software, integrated security solutions, housing and judicial process management software, and more. The new facility’s training schedule will become effective in October 2009.
Article One Partners LLC, an online community that works to validate or invalidate patents by offering cash compensation, says it has uncovered prior art in the JSA Technologies patent that covers the account to account transfer of funds between networks via the Internet. That could invalidate the patent that impacts campus card programs that use the Web to reload money to student accounts from other bank accounts.
Article One’s study for the patent held by JSA “uncovered a broad range of prior art references, including two references that each separately can show the patent to be invalid under the strongest level of invalidity evidence, called anticipation,” says the Article One report.
Prior art is evidence that the patented process, in this case JSA’s patent covering account transfers via the Internet, was in use prior to the patent being issued. As Article One says, such evidence could “come from published content anywhere in the world and in any language, including: previous patents; news or academic publications; non-digitized documents such as textbooks; or any public document provided to others, including conference or academic papers and business materials.”
According to Article One’s JSA study, “(it) uncovered new dramatic invalidating prior art that extensive traditional prior art searches didn’t produce … (including) two separate paths to invalidity under ‘102 anticipation,’ including a U.S. patent, and obscure publications about a product offered in 1997. ” JSA started the patent process in 1998.
Article One has named two advisors who identified the prior art evidence “and will share the monetary reward.”
However, Article One points out that “only a U.S. federal court or the U.S. Patent Office can invalidate a U.S. patent. Article One announces only its own decision for the outcome of Studies—based on its analysis of the prior art for purposes of determining winners to its Patent Studies. A court or the Patent Office may disagree with Article One’s decision. While Article One obtains outside counsel verification, Article One’s invalidity position is not a legal opinion.”
Jim Doyle, JSA’s vice president of operations, said he had not seen the report and therefore could not comment.
Following a successful 12-month pilot, the city of Green Bay and the University of Wisconsin have renewed its yearly agreement that lets students and faculty with valid university ID cards ride city buses for free. In return, the city will receive $35,000 that the university raises from campus parking permits and student fees.
Called U-Pass, it has been “very popular among students, faculty and staff,” said a university administrator.
Ridership from the campus community peaked at more than 6,200 riders in the month of September, as students returned to campus and gas prices hovered at more than $3.50 per gallon.
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What started out as a free service–Metro bus rides–is now costing students at the University of Cincinnati money and another increase may be coming. “We want to keep it going,” said a university spokesperson, who pointed to a reduction in the number of cars on campus as one of the benefits.
The pilot program began two years ago as a free service for students who produced a photo student ID card. The university issued special student IDs so it could track usage and costs. Once the university started charging for the card, $10 initially, usage dropped. The university increased the fee to $15 for the summer quarter and indicated there might be another increase in the fall.
Read more here.
A new survey from campus financial services provider Higher One shows that many college students, in an attempt to adjust to the current economy, are changing their majors or considering graduate school to postpone having to enter the workforce.
According to the poll from the New Haven, Conn.-based company, more than 20% of students are looking at entering a different profession than they were before the economic downturn, and an additional 20% are considering attending graduate school as a direct result of the economy.
Students are also increasing their interest in learning about effective money management. More than 85% reported that they have changed the way they manage their finances in the last year.
“There is no doubt that the economy has impacted students’ financial management habits, and their new budgeting habits are a strong demonstration of their new outlook,” said Miles Lasater, chief operating officer and co-founder of Higher One. “A third of the students said they were spending less money, and nearly 40% are checking account balances more often than they used to.”
Despite the challenges the economy poses for students, many remain positive about their prospects, the survey shows. For example, 54% are confident that they will find a job within six months of graduating. Additionally, those with high confidence in their money management skills have a greater sense of assurance that they will find a job in that time period.
The survey also shows that 69% of students are confident or very confident in their own ability to manage money. That’s up from 67% of students the previous year. Nearly 90% of students regularly balance their finances and budget for future expenditures, 45% save at least five percent of their income, the same percentage as last year, and 86% rated financial management as somewhat or very important.
This was the second annual Higher One Financial Literacy Survey, which is conducted among current college and university students to determine how students manage their money.
Last year, more than 60% said that parents were the most important source for financial information, but this year students primarily turned to the Internet and professional sources. Students have also shifted their interest in learning about certain financial topics. Nearly 20% had a strong desire to learn more about establishing and maintaining credit.
“There has been a shift in how students see money. They used to view money management as unnecessary, but they have started to take a more responsible approach,” Lasater said.
Several colleges and universities have taken steps to meet the new demand for financial management information, while providing students with the professional sources for that information. For example, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Tex., has recently expanded a popular program designed to teach colleges students how to responsibly manage their money.
“Even prior to the economic downturn we saw an increased demand from students for courses on financial management,” said Kristy Vienne, a program director at Sam Houston State. “As the Higher One survey notes, schools and financial services companies alike can certainly help meet this new demand on a variety of levels, from courses to online and printed materials.”
The Higher One Survey was conducted among 464 students nationwide in April 2009. All the survey respondents are enrolled in four-year universities, community colleges or two-year vocational schools and all are Higher One clients.
PNC Bank based in Pittsburgh and West Virginia University in Morgantown have agreed to a five-year contract emphasizing money management and financial responsibility for the school’s 39,000 students, faculty and staff. This includes an electronic refund option through PNC’s Payment Portal, a new on-line tool that administers payments and refunds from the school directly to the student’s account.
In addition, PNC will also build a branch bank in WVU’s student center called the Mountainlair. It will be the bank’s first branch in West Virginia, expanding the number of states served by PNC to 14. The bank said it intends to open a full-service branch in Morgantown in the first quarter of next year.
PNC will also offer a co-branded Visa check card with the WVU logo, AutoAlerts to help students monitor spending and account balances and avoid fees and customized co-branded Web sites (www.pnc.com/wvu), hosted by PNC, where students can complete account applications, manage their finances and find financial and educational information on topics including identity protection.
PNC has relationships with more than 100 schools across an eight-state region, including 17 alliance schools that have extensive relationships with PNC, including Penn State University, the University of Pittsburgh, Marymount University and Seton Hall University.
A desktop computer stolen from Virginia Commonwealth University may have exposed the Social Security numbers of more than 17,000 current and former students. As a result, the university is offering a year of free ID theft insurance to those affected.
The Richmond, Va.-based university quit using Social Security numbers as student identifiers two years ago, but the stolen computer contained student names and test scores dating back to 2005. Police know who stole the computer but could not recover it. The computer was taken for personal use, then disposed of.
Some 200 University of Alberta, Canada employees who ride Edmonton’s Light Rail Transit between the university’s three campuses, will soon get to pilot a contactless transit card. The employees will be given preloaded, plastic cards that they can tap against readers installed at some of the stops.
Transit security will also be equipped with portable card readers, allowing them to scan the passengers’ smart cards to insure they’ve paid for the trip. While the pilot can be expanded to include more LRT riders, it was noted that installing card readers in the city’s buses would be expensive.
