HID Global wins Calypso Awards

HID Global announced that its Soma Atlas CLAP Operating System has won the Best Innovation Award at the 6th annual Calypso Awards Ceremony held recently in Cannes. With this operating system, the company is bringing a new level of trust to low-cost contactless tickets for public transportation. This innovative technology enables next-generation automated fare collection.

HID Global is the world’s first ticketing solution provider to be certified to deliver more secure, lower cost, faster contactless tickets based on an open standard called Calypso Light Application (CLAP). HID’s Soma Atlas CLAP Operating System is the first certified implementation of the CLAP specification based on the Infineon SLE77 platform (ISO 14443 type A&B).

“We are honoured to receive this award in recognition of our innovation in the field of ticketing and transportation,” said Cesare Paciello, Vice President, Ticketing & Transport with HID Global. “HID’s innovation supports an open standard that will help advance Calypso-based tickets to be adopted more quickly.”

Recognized widely and deployed in many countries for secure, fast and flexible ticketing, Calypso is an open standard of contactless ticketing, suitable for multiple applications, especially public transportation in which Calypso cards and NFC mobile phones are used.

Public transportation authorities around the world no longer need to accept lower security, incompatibility, proprietary and slower speeds of low-end ticket systems. HID’s CLAP-certified solution, Soma Atlas, is recognised by the Calypso Networks Association (CNA) as providing interoperability and greater flexibility to transportation operators.

CLAP tickets have the same security as high-end tickets, such as sports season tickets, but at a lower cost than typical Calypso tickets. CLAP is also simple to deploy because, unlike proprietary memory cards, the use of CLAP tickets does not require development work to be integrated into an Automated Fare Collection (AFC) System.