If you actively follow the identity space, you’ll already have heard about this, so feel free to click away (I won’t be offended). On the other hand, if you’re only a casual observer or are curious about IdM, read on.
This morning the Liberty Alliance (LAP) announced that the Internet Society (ISOC) is joining the LAP Management Board. ISOC will be joining other management board members from AOL, BT, CA, Fidelity Investments, Intel, Novell, NTT, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
And according to my boss at ISOC, Lucy Lynch, “ISOC is eager to participate in Liberty Alliance’s well-established collaborative processes to help ensure that the specifications upon which these new technologies are built will promote continued innovation and serve the interests of all Internet users around the world.” And specifically, to join LAP in “promoting and developing the technical foundations of online identity and trust that will be crucial in supporting interoperable, secure and privacy-preserving applications and services on the Internet.”
Over the past couple of years there has been a noticeable increase in momentum around cohesive Identity Management solutions. ISOC working together with LAP is another step toward helping bring the stakeholders together. Undoubtedly, however, there’s still no clear direction for everyone around the table, but bridging across groups will benefit everyone involved (and those who don’t even know they’re a part of the equation).
It’s exciting to see Paul, Jack, =Drummond et al. at Parity releasing a useful customer app under their Azigo brand. They’ve taken the serious foundational work of Higgins and built on top of it a helpful I-Card application.
Their new I-Card offering is called “RemindMe“, and it’s designed to interact with sites you visit that include available membership benefits. By downloading the RemindMe I-Card (assuming you already have the Azigo Card Selector and associated Firefox plugin), you’ll start seeing overlays on various sites (like during Google searches) notifying you of available member offers.
For example, if you’re a member of AAA, you might not realize that the hotels you’re researching for your next trip will give you a discount. Azigo’s RemindMe I-Card will pop a notification into the search result page. Beyond benefiting members, the organization gains visibility as the overlay will appear for anyone with RemindMe, encouraging people to join to access the offer.
Based on a recent post by Phil Windley, it looks like they’re using the Kynetx Network Service to power the overlays. It makes sense to leverage their APIs and focus on the card management experience.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the I-Card model will take off, though. It’s going to be tough convincing people to buy into the experience enough to download a card selector application and then install various I-Cards. If they can hitch their wagon to a useful application, they should be able to go along for the ride, but they’ll need a compelling value proposition to overcome the download.
Wandering around in Barnes and Noble the other day, my daughter handed me a copy of Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi. Since I’m a fan of the Flight anthology he edits, I thought it might be worth a glance.
I’m glad she she already knows my taste as it was a fantastically fun read. Don’t get me wrong, I can read beyond the 3rd grade level, but I really appreciate juvenile graphic fiction that’s something more than spandex supers. I’d put Amulet in the same class as Bone and Rose by Jeff Smith.
BTW - Word on the net is Will Smith’s production company Overbrook purchased the film rights. Anyone with an IMDB Pro account want to confirm the rumor?
In this week’s episode of the Data Without Borders Podcast we are joined by three candidates running for the board of the OpenID Foundation: Chris Messina, Johannes Ernst and Mike Kirkwood. We discuss what the role of the OpenID Foundation is or should be, how OpenID should be marketed and much more.
The election itself is running until December 24th and you can vote if you are a foundation member. To join go here. It’s a simple process, does only cost US$25,- and you can at least somewhat define the direction where the foundation is heading. Also make sure to join the general list in order to learn more about all the 17 candidates.
We recently connected with Christian Scholz who hosts TopfShow, a German podcast, and decided to revive the discussion (in English). The goal of the weekly podcast is to explore various aspects of digital life, focused primarily around user-controlled data portability.
We’re still working out the kinks of the production, but the first couple episodes are available on DataWithoutBorders.net. You can also polute your iPod by subscribing at iTunes.
