Finsphere was founded on a simple, yet powerful vision: Using your mobile phone as a proxy for your identity. Mobile phones today are nearly omnipresent, connected to the largest communication networks in the world, and best represent the SNS state of “AORTA,” or Always On RealTime Access.  With Finsphere’s technology, the mobile phone becomes an AORTA identity validation instrument.  For more than two years, the Finsphere team has been building the Identity Security Services (ISS) platform around this central belief.

“To take advantage of the mobile phone as a proxy for an individual’s identity, we’ve built the ISS platform, a neural network analytics engine that powers a core set of identity authentication services such as financial card authentication, account monitoring for financial institutions, and personal fraud protection,” said Finsphere chairman and CEO, Mike Buhrmann. “And, it doesn’t stop there. Facebook and Google want to be your identity on the Internet. What we want to be is your identity protection or identity security provider on the Internet and all things digital.  We want to protect users while they are on social networking sites or performing financial transactions, whether on their computers at home or the office or on their mobile devices anywhere in the world.”

Future in Review is an annual gathering of world-class thought leaders in technology and economics.  FiRe attendees convene each year with the goal of solving major world problems; a goal that is consistently met through FiRe’s collaboration across disparate industries and the intellectual and strategic guidance of FiRe Chair and SNS CEO, Mark Anderson. Now in its ninth year, Future in Review 2011 will take place May 24-27th at the beautiful Montage Resort in Laguna Beach, California. The Economist has called FiRe “The best technology conference in the world.”

“Finsphere is providing a critical security piece in the global infrastructure that will make AORTA a safe, positive experience for the next generation of global users,” said Anderson, FiRe Chair and SNS CEO.

To register, and to see the draft agenda, go to www.futureinreview.com.

Last year’s attendees were perhaps the first people in the country to hear that the Federal Reserve had lost control of the U.S. economy, oil was going to break the $100 / bbl barrier, and the U.S. economy was going to split, favoring global technology companies even as finance and housing went down.

SNS members, have gotten used to knowing the news before it happens, and being ahead of their friends and competitors on the issues of large-scale, strategic changes in markets and products.

Because those advantages matter more in a down market, I’ll be doing what I can to put together a forward look that will be useful to our guests in the coming year. I hope you’ll join us, and benefit accordingly.

This is always an enjoyable evening, offering a chance to think outside the box, to meet new and old friends and make new business contacts at the reception, to enjoy an excellent dinner, and to be the first to hear our key predictions for the coming year.

As usual, the global business press will be joining us.

We have reduced the fees this year, in keeping with the new landscape. Space is limited, as past attendees know, so don’t wait too long to register ­ which you can do here:

https://www.tapsns.com/newyork/2008/registration.php

SNS members will hark back to February of 2007, when I was able to figure this puzzle out for the first time.  In March I gave warning on CNBC Europe that the carry trade had created too much liquidity, leading to asset bubbles, and recommended that people go into cash.  I put the same advice out to members the prior month.

The currency re-adjustments of Friday are carrying several stories, I think, but this is the most important: that a very large amount of the equities positions in the world were funded by “free money” from Japan.  What we saw Friday was the above charts, showing Part I of the unraveling, as investors sold leveraged equity positions to get back into Yen to pay off their debts, and Part II, a rush into U.S. Treasuries at any price.

The Yen ended up the strongest it has been for many years, followed by the dollar, and all other currencies took massive hits, or stopped trading altogether.

I’ll be writing more about the meaning of this carnage, where it goes next, and who the real winners might be, in our SNS Newsletter.  (New readers can sign up at www.stratnews.com. )

Meanwhile, for what it is worth, it appears that Friday’s trading has put proof to the theory that led to the initial warnings of a global liquidity contraction.  At this stage, one can only hope that the big kids stop putting out each new brushfire, and turn their attention (perhaps at the coming Bretton Woods meeting Nov. 15th) to the global systemic problems that allow this kind of arbitrage.