Identity Brokerage leaving the station
Esther Dyson and Ray Anderson are early investors in Simon Grice’s Midentity - which announced a deal with BT today. I hope that smart folks like Om Malik and Rafat Ali notice this.
I just hate it when deals take months to close, but Simon has been working on this one - forever. It’s the beginning of the deployment of true identity based servcies - into the mainstream.
Imagine Midentity as a Sxip Networks HomeSite - compatible with FOAFnet, i-names, Liberty Alliance, Passport - the whole nine yards. But who cares about any of that - unless the identity is put into a context?
We’ve been trying to show social networking in context with 1UP.com (for gamers) and Glowria.fr (for Movie nuts…..) - and now it looks like Midentity is about to put identity into context for Phone slackers and Gen-X,Y,Zers in the U.K.
Imagine being able to locate friends on your cell phone, IM them, interface to your DLA on your PC at home, download a song, meetup at a coffee house, listen to teh music, upload a photo of the group of friends to your blog, send that photo elsewhere and spontaneously form a group - before dessert comes?
Then you get email from the office, you update your project Wiki, forward a spec list to a comrade in Moscow and - in general - stay on top of your digital lifestyle.
Simon is the one closest to delivering that - right now. He’s got 850,000 folks signed up in the U.K. so far.
Simon has also started a new blog called Personal Digital Identity - I bet allot will be going on over there in 2005. Speaking of which - Simon is having a party on the top of the BT Tower in February. I’m definitely gonna be there for that! See yah in London in February - Simon!
Oh yah - Dick Hardt is also an investor in Midentity. And I hope to hell that WE’RE working for Simon - so I can proudly say “we helepd build Midentity into what it is today.”