OpenID Foundation: Update

Just wrapped up a really good week at Digital ID World. Phil Becker and crew did a great job with this conference this year.

There were quite a few meetings and announcements around OpenID that I thought I’d mention in a blog post.

• Orange (aka France Telecom) announced that they are enabling OpenID’s for all 40 million of their customers. They cover a wide-range of mobile, internet and traditional phone customers and they have taken a very interesting slant on doing identity. They are leveraging the physical nature of the mobile devices and DSL modems in their customers homes to further secure the identities they are provisioning. Very interesting. They also announced that in the near future (they had a screen shot) they will enable consumption of third-party OpenID’s. This is in addition to supporting Yahoo! BBAuth and Google’s Gauth as well.
• I saw the first screen shots of the new OpenID website. The folks at Vidoop have been helping us with this and David and I will head out to Tulsa in a few weeks to finalize this sucker and get it live. This is going to really simplify the OpenID site and make it easier for users and developers to get what they want/need.
• We had another IPR meeting over lunch at the conference and David also sent out the first public draft of the proposal to the OpenID general list. The ramifications of this are huge as it will allow larger entities that have been interested in OpenID be able to participate in a much more formal way. I’m really excited that David and Bill Washburn (and everybody else) have been able to get so far so fast.
• There are some very exciting announcements on tap in the coming weeks. We’re shooting for mid-November to make some formal announcements around what’s happening at the Foundation … keep an eye on this space (and many, many others) for more information.

It was a great week and I’m glad I made it out for the conference. The best is yet to come and things are really starting to heat up folks … :-)