The company adds two senior executives to its team of identity experts

July 17, 2008 — Bellevue, WA — Identity.net today announced the addition of two senior executives – a move that signals the company’s commitment to give consumers from around the world control of their identity and reputation.

Alan Steele was named Vice President of Engineering and will be responsible for product development.   Frank Paterra will serve as Executive Vice President of Operations.   The additional talent will accelerate programs for the adoption of Identity.net by consumers around the world to build and share their reputation, navigate the web with greater ease, and safely share information over the internet.   

“I am excited to have talent of this caliber coming on board just as we launch Identity.net. These additional hires understand the stakes involved with that responsibility for the evolution of the internet to one that is safer to use, more convenient, and more user-centric.” concluded Rob Monster, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO. 

“With Alan and Frank taking leadership roles at our company, we have the ability to execute and scale our business growth strategies and deliver superior solutions with Identity.net,” said Co-Founder and President Jim Adler.  “They know the consumer market, are very familiar with identity protection and security, and understand why consumers want to take control of their identity and reputation.”

Alan Steele is a startup veteran with over 15 years of experience at Avogadro, Viathan Corp., eRoom Technology and Midnight Networks.  Alan was most recently the Founder and CEO of Mergelab, a Seattle-based startup that developed technology for merging user profile and identity information and aggregating feeds of information from user contacts.  Prior to founding Mergelab, Alan was SVP of Products at Jobster where he built an unrivaled technical team in Development, Product Design, Operations and QA. At Jobster, Alan integrated the acquisitions of WorkZoo.com and Jobby, growing Jobster’s consumer destination to over 1 million unique visitors/month.  He received his BS in Writing and Computer Science from M.I.T.

Frank Paterra brings a strong background in business process, product management, operations and corporate acquisitions.   Prior to joining Identity.net, Frank was most recently Vice President of Corporate Development responsible for the acquisition of SmartShopper and served as general manager while at Zango, an online media company.  Previously, Frank founded Fluency Software which provided services and software products to the enterprise software market.  Prior to Fluency, Frank worked for Rational Software as the general manager of the Rose Business Unit, responsible for one fourth of the company’s revenues.  Before this he worked with NASA  to develop artificial intelligence systems to aid in the development and operation of satellites. Frank has published over 20 technical articles.  He received his BS in Computer Science from Frostburg State College and his MS and PhD degrees in artificial intelligence and high speed network protocol development from Old Dominion University. 

About Identity.net

Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, the company’s mission is to put consumers firmly in control of their online identity and reputation.  The Identity.net (formerly Demoxi) software is built on 50 issued patents and 10 years of advanced research in the fields of cryptography and online identity.  For more information, visit www.identity.net or contact Jennifer Curley at 202.422.6244 or Jennifer@CurleyCompany.com

Single Sign-on Solution for the Digital World

 
July 16, 2008 — Bellevue, WA — Identity.net launched today, giving consumers control of their Internet identity and reputation. With the new site users can build and share their identity, navigate the web with greater ease and control, and verify attributes about their online reputation.  Current features of Identity.net include: single sign-on to web sites, selective or anonymous identification, portable personal content, and reputation management.

“Identity is an unsolved problem on the Internet today. Unlike the Internet itself, there is no central directory for verified users of the Internet. As a result, we have spam, online fraud, and with that the inherent transaction friction associated with an online world where everyone is guilty until proven innocent,” said Rob Monster, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Identity.net. “Identity.net lets users invest in build and manage online identities that are portable across the Internet, while also being in full control of what, when and where information about their identity is public or private. Our launch partners agree that the arrival of Identity.net marks the arrival of web 3.0, putting consumers firmly in the driver’s seat and giving them the best of identity, privacy, and reputation management.”

At Identity.net, users can create their own personal “reputation” web page where they can choose to publicly share either in its entirety or as select subsets, depending on the audience.  Users can verify their identity attributes once and then reuse that verified identity information across the Internet.  For example, creating JohnDoe.Identity.net enables John Doe to put all his information on one site, 3^rd party verify specific identity attributes and use this with other sites he cares to engage with.  He may choose to share all the information on a MySpace page or select his professional accomplishments and highlight just those attributes on Linked In.   John could also create multiple pages for the different “reputations” he chooses to share, i.e.: Johnlovestoshop.Identity.net.

“Identity.net frees users to take their reputation with them as they engage online, so their reputation isn’t just tied to a specific site, it travels with the consumer as he/she uses the internet for blogging, shopping, conducting business or even engaging with the various social media sites.” stated Jim Adler, President of Identity.net. “By providing a single source for users to control and manage their individual reputation – it makes the reputation portable.  This saves time and gives the user control of what is publicly available about him/her on the internet.”

Identity.net (formerly Demoxi) added more than 200,000 unique users per month during its public beta and secured a network of valuable launch partners and affiliates. Functionality includes single sign-on and a digital wallet for holding online credentials.  The entire package is a one-stop for identity and reputation management.

Your identity travels to many websites, your home computer, your work computer, Internet cafes, your phone, and every card in your wallet. So far, the burden for keeping it all straight has been on you. That’s all about to change.

Today we announced the launch of Identity.net — a website and growing set of services dedicated to giving you control of your identity, both online and offline. So, what can Identity.net do for you today? Well, to start, two things: single sign-on and verified personas.

Single Sign-On, Of Course

Identity.net supports OpenID which, for the uninitiated, means two things:

1. You can use your Identity.net OpenID at sites around the web. This means you can visit all your favorite (participating) websites without having to remember yet another username and password. Currently, more than 13,000 sites accept OpenIDs.
2. If you already have an OpenID (from sites like Yahoo, Google, AOL), you can use Identity.net without registering. As of July 2007, more than 120 million OpenIDs have been issued.

OpenID certainly helps reduce the number of usernames/passwords you’re forced to litter around the Web. But, the real power of OpenID is that it lays the groundwork for you, the user, to control how your information is shared with websites. Much more to come on that topic.

Verified Personas — we call them RepSheets

In your everyday life, you enjoy, what I like to call, various degrees of disclosure. When you’re in a grocery store, people can roughly tell (with some certainty) your age, gender, marital status, and location. But they can’t tell where you live, where you work, or much of anything else about you unless you tell them.

There’s nothing like this on the Internet. On one side of the spectrum, there are websites where everyone knows your name, all the recommendations are positive, and everyone is above average. On the other side, there are anonymous, flame-throwing blog commenters who can say anything they want without fear of retribution or damage to their reputation.

Identity.net aims to fill the breach — multiple personas linked to real data about you. On Identity.net, you have a private profile where you keep your personal data. If you want, you can have some of your personal data verified by a third party. We partnered with Trufina to verify your name, home address, and birthday. And that’s just the start. We’ll be verifying more attributes soon.

Once you’ve entered information into your profile, you can choose to share some of it on what we call a RepSheet. A RepSheet is just a personal web page with stuff that you choose to share about yourself. For example, I have a RepSheet at http://jimadler.identity.net. It looks a lot like my public LinkedIn profile — basically my online resume. On this RepSheet, you can see that my first name, last name, and home city/state were verified by Trufina. I also have a RepSheet at http://jim.identity.net, which is less formal, showing only my first name and home city/state, also verified by Trufina.

I can reference my jimadler.identity.net RepSheet on more professional sites and my jim.identity.net RepSheet for more personal uses. For example, you can link to yourself with your RepSheet link on blog post comments, social networks, dating sites. See here for the growing list of ways to link your RepSheet on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and others.

For those geeks among you, RepSheets support hCard so sites can easily import the RepSheet information you’ve chosen to share (Identity.net is also a member of DataPortability.org). Of course, they can never gain access to the underlying profile information you haven’t chosen to share.

Places to Go and Things to Do

To date, there’s been great technology developed for identity (like OpenID, oAuth, SAML, etc.) but little reason for regular folks to use it. It’s like the industry is selling car keys but not cars. That’s been changing with the expansion of OpenID, but it’s been a slow process.

So the idea is to give you control of a secure, trustworthy place for your identity and a bunch of cool things to do with it on Identity.net and around the Web. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be rolling out services to do just that. Stay tuned!