Credit card companies have come up with various new ways of fighting identity theft through new technolgies on the cards themselves.  But these new ideas haven't stuck, mainly because they require merchants to change their equipment.  A team of Carnegie Mellon students who developed a way of making a credit card magnetic stripe that could change its data from one card to another, allowing for greater security and added flexibility (theoretically, a person can carry several "cards" on just the one card).  And for their novel idea, the team--now a company named Dynamics--was awarded the grand prize at the 2009 Rice Business Plan Competition.  CNNMoney.com Small Business has a profile of Dynamics, and other winners at the competition, here.  For more background on the competition, click here.