Been a Busy Two Weeks!
Not too long ago I learned from my colleges in our Japanese office about things happening around OpenID in Asia. Working with Kentaro Sakamoto-san from VeriSign Japan, I managed to setup a trip coinciding with the ITU-T's Focus Group on Identity Management meeting, to Tokyo and Seoul. Working with Sakamoto-san and Andy Song from AhnLab, who I met at Web 2.0 Expo this year, we managed to setup a great trip where I spent about a week in Tokyo and 22 hours in Seoul. I had a lot of great meetings in Tokyo and in Seoul AhnLab hosted a wonderful half-day OpenID session. Slides from that are up on SlideShare at http://www.slideshare.net/daveman692/open-id-overview-seoul-july-2007 Thanks again to Sakamoto-san, everyone at VeriSign Japan, and Andy for being terrific hosts.
Last Saturday, we completed the upgrade of our Personal Identity Provider. All accounts have been automatically upgraded and the URL is the same at http://pip.verisignlabs.com. We definitely encourage everyone to come try it out as we believe it is the best OpenID Provider in existence! Not only does it have all of the features from the PIP we launched last May, but adds support for OpenID 2.0, the ability to manage multiple identities within one PIP account, integration with strong authentication via our VeriSign Identity Protection network, Information Card support as one way to help protect against phishing attacks, and our SeatBelt Firefox add-on which works with a variety of OpenID Providers.
This week I'm up in Portland OR at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention. Tuesday morning, Simon Willison and I gave a three-hour OpenID Bootcamp tutorial where we dove into many different aspects of OpenID from a basic introduction, to security concerns and solutions, to implementation details. Slides from the tutorial are also up on SlideShare at http://www.slideshare.net/daveman692/openid-bootcamp-tutorial. In the afternoon, Simon and I joined Tim O'Reilly during his Radar Executive Briefing where we gave an update on OpenID and discussed why as he said, "OpenID is taking the world by storm".
Ending the day Tuesday, I was awarded a Google-O'Reilly Open Source award which I posted more about on my personal blog. The award I won was for Best Strategist which refers to the work I've done over this past year at VeriSign within the wider OpenID community. Am certainly really honored to have been recognized, though am guessing I now need to work on raising my hacker geek cred again. :P
