I Know Dick!
When
I stepped into the Sxip hospitality suite at the Catalyst Conference last Thursday,
a nice young lady stuck a label on my shirt bearing the hand-written exclamation,
"I Know Dick!" It was a clever marketing trick; several people in
other hospitality suites asked about it.
I don’t know Dick well, but I am impressed. Dick
Hardt is the founder and CEO of Sxip Identity
(pronounced ‘Skip’), a startup company focused on the "vision of a simple,
secure and open identity network that enables individuals to create and manage
their online digital identities." I admire both Dick’s vision and his drive
to bring interesting technology to market.
Dick’s presentation at Catalyst was hands-down the most entertaining of the
entire conference. He used a rapid-fire presentation style with only one or
two words on each slide. The presentation was laced with both humor and insight,
clearly describing the issues surrounding user-centric Identity for the Internet
and proposing specific solutions — all leading to what Dick termed "Identity
2.0."
In
the Sxip hospitality suite I met Dick personally. As I ate ice cream, Dick showed
me a simple flow diagram where "a user can securely store personal information
at a Homesite and control the release of that information to other web sites,
called Membersites, that request the information when the user clicks a Sxip
button at the Membersite." This puts the Internet user, not large, suspicious
companies, in charge of the user’s Identity.
I
look forward to monitoring the progress of Sxip, to see how this little upstart
company will play in enabling user-centric Identity for the Internet. In the
mean time, I pause now and then to thank Dick for being an early investor in
Flickr, one of my favorite
websites. Check out his photos.
Tag: Identity
fyi … Dick Hardt’s presentation is viewable online here:
http://www.identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/
The link here is from Dick’s keynote talk at OSCON.
Comment by Greg Hamer on October 4, 2005 at 11:12 pm[Trackback] Many bloggers have the wrong perception of federated identity. Let me tell you why…
Comment by Thought Leadership on October 24, 2005 at 4:55 am