Founder Globaltech, a mainland-based company specializing in fingerprint identification technology, aims to tap into the Hong Kong market, targeting small- and medium-sized companies.

"Hong Kong is rather backward in deploying technology for commercial use," said Eric See, managing director of Founder Globaltech. "Fingerprint identification has been widely used in governmental departments and banking institutions on the mainland."

The company hopes to spread the use of this technology to corporate and retail chains as a low cost and effective solution to tackle security and punctuality problems at work.

Among most of the companies in Hong Kong, a clock-in and clock-out system is used to take the attendance of employees, said Elvis Law, sales manager of Founder Globaltech, FingerTech. But he says it's not reliable.

"With the web-based FingerTech, employees only need to put their fingers on the sensors that attached to the laptop and the Internet, and employees' attendance will be taken accordingly," Law said. "It saves time and effort for management in finding out who is at work and who is not."

According to See, this technology can be deployed in security use as well, such as online banking or gate-passing. Fingerprint identification can be a more reliable and efficient means of replacing the existing password and log-in systems.

See said: "Using cards for security reasons is very backward now. And if your card is stolen, someone else can use your security card to get access to your personal particulars. With fingerprint identification, however, this will be hard, since we all have different fingerprints."

Though the technology is not yet wide spread in Hong Kong, the company is confident of the high-end users in the market.

"Hong Kong is a small market, but we see potential in this market with more users who can make use of this mature technology," Law said. "Educating the public is very important."

Going forward, Founder Globaltech hopes to reach its global sales target of around 30,000 units this year, representing a 30 percent increase from last year.

The company is also looking into development of high-end face feature, cornea, palm print and vein identification technologies.

(HK Edition 10/30/2008 page2)