It was announced last week that “passport cards that Americans can use to travel to other nearby countries will have a technology that allows information on the card to be read from a distance.” Doesn’t it make you feel warmy, fuzzy and safe that your Identity can be read without your permission by anyone within 20 feet? I think I’d rather stand in line a bit longer.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management

Ok. Here’s some off the wall insight into how my mind works, or doesn’t work, depending on your point of view.

The Liberty Alliance’s recent announcement of companies that passed Full-Matrix SAML 2.0 Interoperability Testing spoke of building a build a “more trusted Internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide.”

Ashish Jain reported in his blog today that “trust is the business word for love.”

My niece, Katie Larsen, posted a music video on her blog that suggested “cello tape” (or “scotch tape” to us on the US side of the pond) as a metaphor for love.

Does that mean that identity federation is the cello tape that ties the business world together?

Perhaps Eve Maler could write a song about this to be performed at the next Identity gathering. Eve?

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Federation

Sometimes we in the Identity Management market like to think the world revolves around us. But, alas, something will come along to jolt us back to reality and remind us that we are still a fairly obscure bunch.

Today, I googled “circle of trust,” thinking I might find some pertinent wisdom for an Identity Federation presentation I am preparing. It was interesting to note that on the first Google page, precisely zero out of ten responses had to do with Federated Identity Management. The first link referred to a Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR) regiment, followed by the Gun Blast magazine, the Center for Courage & Renewal, a Recreational Vehicle group, child sexual abuse resources, an article about search engine optimization, a pro-child, anti-crime organization, a Lord of the Rings kinship, an article about laptop security and the Frat Pack.

It appears that Robert DeNiro’s explanation of the “circle of trust” to Ben Stiller in the film “Meet the Parents” is much more well known and understood than the stuff we discuss in the dark annals of Identity Management lore.

A mention of Federated Identity Management and circles of trust was not to be found until page 4, item 6: an IT Week article, “Building a circle of trust.” . I guess it is fair to say that Circles of Trust in the Federated Identity context are far removed from popular social consciousness.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Federation,
Circle of Trust

Your life on NFC. Sound ominous?

A short video from Nokia illustrates the vision of using Near Field Communications (NFC) technology in a mobile phone to make many day-to-day tasks easier for consumers. Soon, you may be able to add your wallet and your keys to the broadening set of functions supported by your mobile phone.

The big question is – what must be provided by the Identity Management industry to make this technology to assure security and protect privacy while providing a satisfying user experience?

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
NFC

Most discussions about Identity federation treat lightly the real business reasons for implementing federation while focusing primarily on technical issues. While the technology is vitally important, federation will not be widely adopted until business leaders gain a firm grasp of the real business justification for implementing federation technology and associated legal agreements. To that end, I recently prepared a presentation entitled, “Federation: A Critical Enabler for Dynamic Business,” focused on why service providers should implement Identity federation.

Let me share with you a list of what I consider to be the top nine reasons a service provider should leverge Identity federation to enable business value:

Identity Federation enables:

• Enhanced User experience – simplifes and enriches user experience through SSO, account linkage and service integration
• Privacy protection – prevents exchange of sensitive credentials and user attributes
• Service aggregation – enables access to multiple service partners
• Content delivery – enables delivery of content from multiple sources
• Advanced advertising – increases ad value through analytics of data from multiple sources
• Rapid time to market – enables rapid linkage to service and content sources
• Cost avoidance – enables service integration at lower cost than non-standard methods
• Leveraged business expansion – enables accelerated growth in delivery capacity and subscriber demand
• Foundation for future innovation – enables advanced automation

During the weeks ahead, I will address these topics in more detail. I welcome your input and critique.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Federation

Here is a little index to make it a bit easier to find my blog entries about Mobile Internet World (in reverse chronological order):

• Babies and Phones
• Day 3
• Day 2
• Day 1
• Onsite, ready to start
• Expectations

Thanks for stopping by.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Mobility,
Mobile Internet,
Mobile Internet World

Why in the world (pun intended) would an Identity guy spend the week in Boston attending Mobile Internet World while my Sun Identity colleagues and the rest of the mainstream Identity community were focused on the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit in Los Angeles?

Two words: Babies + Phones.

Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Sun Microsystems,
mobility,
Mobile Internet

Earlier this week, Deloitte announced that it acquired the Identity and Access Management business of Iditarod Systems, Inc., a leading boutique systems integrations firm with deep experience in implementing Sun’s Identity Manager product.

I think this is an excellent move for Deloitte and for the Iditarod team. I have long been impressed with the high calibre of talent and experience in the Iditarod people. This acquisition will solidify Deloitte’s position in the ranks of major SI partners supporting Sun’s Identity Management product line, and will give extended reach and increased opportunity to the talented Iditarod team.

Additionally, Deloitte’s commitment to Enterprise Role Lifecyle Management, which leverages the Vaau technology Sun is acquiring, positions Deloitte/Iditarod and Sun/Vaau in a joint position of strength to implement Role-based Indentity Management strategies.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Deloitte,
Iditarod,
Vaau

The first edition of the Mobile Internet World conference is now in the history books. It was certainly well-worth my time to participate. Attendance declined a bit today, but I enjoyed most of the sessions more than yesterday. The highlights of sessions I attended are included below. Tomorrow, I’ll post a summary of overall themes.

Mobile Internet Now & Tomorrow – An Operator View (Alexandre Froment-Curtil, Head of Vodafone live! and Mobile Internet, Vodafone Group Marketing)

• The Eurpoean mobile Internet market has 100 million active subscribers using data services and shows 80% YOY growth in mobile music revenues.
• Key factors in DSL / Broadband growth were content availability, pricing simplicity and network speed. Mobile internet growth will probably depend on the same factors
• Vodafone’s marketing slogan is “Take the Internet Out – It’s now on your mobile … make the most of now.”
• Vodafone is very bullish on this market. They believe that mobility will transform the Internet. Mobile will become the dominant tool for Internet access.
• 4 babies are born every second in the world; 32 phones are sold every second (8 phones per baby!)
• The customer of tomorrow will:
• Be highly connected
• Use multiple interfaces / devices
• Access at all times of the day
• Maintain an online identity – live in the online world
• Successful services will integrate four dimensions of customer’s life (content, space, people, time)
• Vodafone is confident about the role of operators
• In conclusion:
• The journey has begun – we have begun to experience success
• There is one internet – different ways to experience it
• Operators must build on customer trust and offer a converged and open service environment

The Evolution of Mobile Broadband (Ray Dolan, SVP Strategy and Market Development, Qualcomm Enterprise Services)

• Convergence in the wireless world depends on
• Network evolution
• Mobile device evolution
• Service escalation
• New, powerful processors will put more power in the handset. The Snapdragon processor is 1ghz, dual core, low power consumption.
• The iPod blurs the boundary between PC and phone.
• We must deliver increasingly powerful services for customers.
• UMB and WiMAX will likely co-exist.

Mobile Internet: Realizing the Business Potential in the New Multimedia World (Pankaj Asundi, Vice President Media and Content, Ericsson)

• The “My Life” video was a great depiction of potential of global interaction via online connection, as told by person in the future recalling digital interaction events of the past.
• We must think how services may affect users in their lives.
• “Digital natives” are those that grow up in connected world.
• The rich digital lifestyle is changing consumer behavior.
• We must sure people get what they want, when they want it. Users must be at the center of the design process.
• The mobile media value chain is transforming rapidly, including advertisers, media companies, aggregators, carriers and consumers (acting both as generators and consumers of content).
• Multiple industries (telco, web and new media) are addressing consumers (same wallet, same attention span) from three different angles. The three industries need to come together.
• Participants in the value chain must:
• Reach the user across multiple channels and platforms.
• Engage the user by richer and more compelling services.
• Monetize the user by leveraging customer insight and adapting musiness models.

Marketing in a New Mobile World (Larry Weber, Chairman and Founder, W2 Group)

• Software vendors will take over the mobile industry, as they took over the computer industry in late 1980’s.
• The mobile device is becoming the primary user device – not the laptop or PC.
• We are too technically focused. We must focus on creating environments on mobile. Transactions will come after creation of environment.
• Mobile advertizing is the next frontier. One third of the $120 billion in TV ads are DVR’d and skipped. This will drive a big shift from TV to mobile and social media on the web.
• We must not focus on mobile as a single medium. The challenge is to bring many media types together.
• Demographics are no longer the most important advertizing factors. Behavior is key.
• Brands will need to engage with specific audiences they wish to reach. The mobile device and be the ultimate method for carrying on dialog with consumer.
• The phone is a social device. The killer app is conversation. That fundamental concept begs to be leveraged.

Executive Roundtable: Mobile Internet Ecosystem (Panel discussion led by Berge Ayvazian, CSO Yankee Group, Conference Co-Chair)

James Pearce, Vice President of Technology, dotMobi (.mobi domain)
Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director, CMO Council
B. Craig Cumberland, Sr. Director Technology and Applications Marketing, Nokia
Lawrence (Larry) Moores, Vice President, Global Marketing and Product Management, Real Networks

• The ecosystem includes everything from the handset to the rest of the world.
• Customer expectations goes ahead of technology adaptation – continues to challenge technology.
• Consumers are suffering “function fatique and feature frustration” on handsets, while not necessarily getting functions they want.
• Developers are a critical part of the ecosystems. One positive thing about Android is that it puts developers at the front of the queue.
• A large percent of smart phone users are active users of mobile Internet.
• SMS has not yet been leveraged to its potential.
• We are still struggling with compelling user experience – just not there yet.
• Content licensing or Digital Rights Management are big problems

.

How Carriers Drive Revenues from the Mobile Web Today (Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software)

• Opera’s vision is to provide the best Internet experience on any device.
• 26 million people have downloaded and used Opera Mini
• Widgets are a method of providing special user experience within a web brower. Over 1500 widgets have been developed for the Opera browser. WC3 is working on widget standard.
• Examples of carriers successfully using the Opera browser include T-mobile, KDDI and Vodafone.

Content Adaptation: Wired to Mobile (Brendan Benzing, InfoSpace, Inc.; Eran Wyler, InfoGin)

• Search and navigation will be starting point for all mobile media.
• No one portal will serve needs of all people.
• Search should be optimized for the phone.
• Content can’t just be transcoded. It must be understood and translated to the small screen.
• InfoGin handles javascript and Flash and copes with sites optimized for Internet Explorer.

Venture Capital Activity in the Mobile Internet Ecosystem (Paul Schaut, Independent Advisor – was CEO of Internet bubble company)

Bob Geiman, Polaris Ventures
Jeff Glass, Bain Capital
B. Lane MacDonald, Alta Communications
Dinesh Moorjani, IAC Search and Media

• Key trends and challenges
• Is the mobile Internet different than the Internet?
• Will new brands be created or will existing brands move to this space?
• Will carriers let new brands emerge in this space?
• Can you build your own brand in this space?
• Without the right capacity, services become meaningless – are investments happening to enable this?
• Carriers would rather that video streaming not happen on the cellular network. New networks are needed.
• The tremendous number of permutations of handsets, operating systems, code bases, etc., is not solved yet.
• The one-to-one interface of the mobile is attractive for targeted advertizing. Its potential is enormous.
• Carriers hold the bulk of power in the industry – determination of who wins depends largely on them.
• The iPhone has increased general awareness of the potential of mobile devices, but Apple is not friendly to companies who want to chart their own destiny.
• The Google-led Open Handset Alliance is generating buzz but it is too early to tell about success. Google becoming a dominant force in mobile doesn’t necessarily foster innovation, because they can squash startups.
• Advice to Startups:
• Startups need to balance working through carriers and selling direct to consumers, providing multifaceted distribution channels
• Think about mobile’s strong opportunity in developing markets.
• Learn from those who have gone before you – figure out what is working – refine the model to get scale.
• If you are trying something that is not working, find new ways leverage what you have ; build strategic assets.
• Pay attention to the folks in the value chain that can say yes or no along the way. Have a value proposition that can satisfy needs of everyone who can say yes or no.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Mobility,
Mobile Internet World

Today is the first “official” day of the inaugural Mobile Internet World conference. There was standing room only for today’s sessions. The highlights of the sessions I attended are included below:

Conference Opening Address: Anywhere: The Killer App for the Mobile Internet (Emily Nagle Green, President & CEO, Yankee Group)

• The vision of Yankee Group is that computers and their netorks are moving us towards ubiquitous connectivity, when all people and all things are connected, Anywhere.
• Mobility implies lliberation – no longer being chained to one place, one device, one network. We can have our work and play with us.
• Today’s mobile Internet is not all that good yet. The economic contribution of mobile Internet is small.
• What happened when motors became small and less expensive? They transformed from standalone devices to components of special-purpose devices (e.g. motors in washing machines, can openers and blenders.
• Connectivity is the 21st century anolog of electric motors being embedded in appliances. Connectivity is more than than connecting screens. What if cars, motorcyles, garage door openers, air conditioners or home security systems were connected? Connectivity is about adding value to consumer life style. We must ask challenging questions: what devices can be made more valuable by adding connectivity?
• What obstacles, if conquered, would lead to market growth?
• Insufficient and uncertain radio spectrum
• Too expense equipment and tariffs
• Device subsidies; carrier controls
• Unsatisfactory network performance
• Inefficient application devleopment environment
• Limits and fears about location information usage
• Conclusion: The mobile internet is the next massive value creation opportunity in technology.

Mobile Internet Utopia (Greg Clayman, Executive Vice President of Digital Distribution and Business Development, MTV Networks)

• Key areas of focus for MTV networks in the mobile Internet market include:
• Openness of technology and platforms
• Innovation, including learning from the web experience and understanding the new economics of mobile
• Focusing on what consumers want.
• Targeted advertising has huge potential; long way to go.
• Social networking has redefined the online culture. We need to take provide connection to social networks on mobile phones.
• The online culture is a “recommnedation culture.” We need to focus on audience engagement.

Mobilizing the Internet: One Carrier’s Unique Perspective (Jack Dziak, Senior Vice President Corporate Strategy, Sprint Nextel)

• Megatrends driving growth in the mobile market include
• wireless – wireless minutes growing 30%/year, as wireline minutes decline
• internet growth – internet is mainstay of daily growth
• Of the $59 ARPU for Sprint subscribers last month, $10 was in data services.
• Mobile telephony has centered around voice services, but is now evolving toward data. Broadband services are evolving from fixed broadband to mobile Internet.
• Network performance must be defined by both speed and capacity in an environment of scarce spectrum.
• Sprint’s two major initiatives in mobile Internet include WiMAX and Open Handset Alliance (OHA).
• Wimax represents new flexible platform with a 10x cost/performance improvement.
• Sprint likes OHA because it will
• Facilitate customer access to mobile internet
• Provide open tools for creative, innovative and compelling applications
• Drive mobile data usage (this is their real focus)
• Enable customer choice
• Growth of the mobile Internet will require:
• More network capacity at lower cost
• Innovation in distribution to many types of devices
• Innovation in multimedia solutions (interactive and personalized)
• Affordability and flexibility of payment
• Improvements to backhaul network
• Devices with lower power consumption and higher battery life.
• To add value on top of OHA, carriers must add value by combining location, presence and status to services.

Escaping the Walled Garden: Growing the Mobile Web with Open Standards (Tim Berners-Lee, Director, World Wide Web Consortium)

• The most important things about the world wide web:
• It is universal
• It runs on any hardware and any software
• It works in any language
• It is accessible to the disabled
• It works with information from scribbles to finished books
• It is a great sandbox to foster innovation
• The web was successful because it allowed creative re-use. Content created once could be used many times in unanticipated ways.
• The long tail on the WWW is huge, even though major channels are important.
• Open standards are essential. If enough people bet on a standard, markets take off – often in different ways than imagined. Companies that choose proprietary methods will lose out on market growth when standards ultimately win.
• The W3C – Mobile Web Initiative is developing guidelines on how to use standards for mobile web.

Keynote: Making Wireless Global, Affordable and Personal (Greg Delagi, Texas Instruments, Senior Vice President, General Manager of TI’s Wireless Terminals Business)

• The global mobile phone market is huge: 3 billion active subscribers; will grow to 4 billion by 2010. One billion mobile phones sold per year.
• Mobile phone sales growth factors include:
• Replacement devices, which provide compelling new features
• New subscribers, particularly driven by affordability for high growth economies (e.g. India, China, Eastern Europe and South America)
• Smartphones are the fastest growing segment in mobile industry.
• The mobile phone and consumer electronics experience will increasingly interact because of functional convergence on a single device.
• Mobility will liberate and extend the web 2.0 experience.
• Increased data rates will enable higher performance applications.

Luncheon Keynote Presentation: Open Internet, Open Platform: Open Opportunities (Kiyo Oishi, SVP Global Marketing, ACCESS)

• The Google OFA annoucement focused a lot of attention on the mobile Internet market.
• One billion mobile broadband users by are expected by 2013.
• Software complexity is driving hardware development faster than Moore’s law can accommodate.
• An open Internet and open platforms will lead to a converged world.
• Mobile Linux is experiencing explosive growth.

Is An Open Platform the Future of the Mobile Internet? (Panel discussion led by John Jackson, Vice President, Yankee Group)
Greg Delagi, Texas Instruments, Senior Vice President, General Manager of TI’s Wireless Terminals Business
Rich Miner, VP Wireless Strategy, Google
Didier Diaz, SVP Product Strategy Management, ACCESS
Stephanie Mehta, Senior Writer, FORTUNE Magazine
Bill Weinberg, Marketing Director, Linux Phone Standards Forum
Kevin Packingham, Vice President of Wireless Product Management and Usability, Sprint Nextel

• OHA shows that the market is getting serious about bridging the gap between mobile and the Internet
• Companies must look to provide value to their customer. Ultimately, consumers want choice.
• Open source has never been developed in this industry. The industry has paid lip service to openness, but has typically done only a portion of what is necessary to open things up.
• OHA includes a thin operating system layers, plus a set of other functions.
• It is felt that the open platform will increase the speed of innovation and reduce fragmentation, but there is some concern that OHA is “fighting fragmentation with fragmentation.”
• Will carriers want to control what the user will experience when they turn on the phone? Will carriers be willing to relinquish valuable real estate to other players?
• Carriers currently are responsible to take customer care calls. This is a built in economic disadvantage for carrier.

Global Trends Driving the Mobile Internet (Marc Patterson, Vice President and General Manager – Mobile Data Services, BT Global Services)

• We operate in a market too complex for one company or organization to control. Collaboration is essential.
• Key challenges for businesses include cost reduction, globalization and agility.
• The key driver for mobility in enterprise applications is enabling business functionality, not in providing cheaper access.
• The converged enterprise mobility ecosystem must address home, office and mobile devices – taking the office whereever you go.
• The “prosumer” (professional consumer) is creating a revolution in enterprisers. The edge is blurred between business and home users.
• HS/DPA (not WiMAX) is rolling out rapidly in Europe. Adoptions rates have been “staggering.”
• Rapid adoption of flat top tariffs instead of usage based tariffs is increasing demand for wireless broadband.
• Mobile Unified Communications, a seamless integration of communications technologies, is the Holy Grail.

Building Business Models for the Mobile Internet (Panel discussion led by Rory Altman, Altman Vilandrie & Company)

Lubna Dajani, Mobile Monday
Douglas Edwards, Handmark
Tuomo Sihvola, Widsets
Carl Taylor, Hutchison Whampoa Europe
Jon S. von Tetzchner, Opera Software

• When tariffs move to flat rate charges – uptake skyrockets.
• Mobility use cases – not just web browsing on the phone – will enable growth .
• There was a significant difference of opinion on whether mobile web browsers were sufficient or whether other applications were needed.
• Mobile browsers have widespread adoption. The Opera Mini browser has 100K dowloads per day and enables 1billion page views per month.
• Improving mobile browsers may not be a strong enough use case to make users come daily into a mobile experience. We need daily users – driven by something that attracts them into constant mobile Internet experience.
• The user experience on the handset is fundamentally different than for a PC. It must be simplified and improved. It must be more relevant to the user.
• Only 12% of handsets in US have data plans. Only 3-4% actually use them.
• There is a disconnect between the number of people actually getting mobile Internet access and projected ad revenue.
• For PC Internet access, ad revenue tracked penetration of broadband into the home. What will the trend to which will predict mobile advertising growth?
• If carriers engage with brands and technology companies, they will share in revenue streams. If they choose walled gardens (walled prisons) they will lose.
• The winners may depend on who is capable of delivering the customer.
• Europe is increasingly embracing handset subsidies to add post-paid customers, while the US is trying to get away from subsidies.
• Carriers will continue to have power until people change their attitudes of buying devices for voice and text. Consumers have not yet made the leap from “device as phone” to “device as convergent communicator.”
• Multiple industry entrants (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Google) drive innovation. We should collaborate on basics and compete on value add.
• Widgets are one model that leverage web standards but give a richer user experience on the device.
• The secret for advertising is to make it relevant and not obnoxious. People regularly pay for printed media that is full of advertising – a form of information of interest to the purchaser. “Advertising as content” should speak to people about what they are interested in.

Demystifying the Next Generation of Mobile Internet Technologies (Caroline Gabriel, ReThink Research (chair)

• Darren Koenig, Director, Wireless Communications, TeleAtlas
• Connectivity and Context are key
• consumers are finally aware – they want advanced features. For example, 84% of consumers want GPS on next phone.
• Eventually, Locations Based Services (LBS) will be embedded in everything.
• Bennett Marks, Open Mobile Alliance / Nokia
• After 10 years in market making, 2007 marks the time to move to the next step
• Critical factors for growth include growing the development community and deploying contextualization technologies in a much bigger scope than GPS (e.g. patterns of usage, physical environment, work vs. play role.)
• Dan Stoops, Alcatel-Lucent
• Consumer don’t care about technology acronymns – they care about choice and services.
• Services must be merged or linked across across traditional boundaries.
• Faraz Syed, Mobile Complete
• Do consumers really know about the existence of these cool products? How will they find out?
• Rao Yallapragada, Qualcomm
• 3G technologies are delivering mobile broadband today
• UMB and LTE are positioned to dominate the future

Mobile Widgets. Web 2.0 and beyond… (Dan Shugrue, Senior Business Development Manager, S60 Platform, Nokia)

• Here and now is the inflection point about how we access the Internet
• More converged devices than laptops.
• Consumers spending more time with IM, flickr, youtube, etc. than spending on mobile telephony
• Apple and Google enter the mobile space.
• Big market: 4 billion subscribers by 2010 – 90% of worlds population will be covered; 60% penetration to population.
• Bigger installed base of converged devices than laptops today
• Open standards are required for growth.
• The Nokia S-60 platform is uses open standards and is openly licensed to multiple handset manufacturers.
• Widgets are small, specialized applications that access web services and phone services to provide a richer user experience.
• Widgets enable the long tail of innovation by allowing developers to easily leverage web technologies.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Mobility,
Mobile Internet World