No doubt about it, identity is hot these days, but most of the discussions are centered around digital identity. Between identity theft and the difficulties of online authentication, a slew of efforts are underway to standardize and streamline how identity is created and used on the network.

Think this doesn’t matter to you? Think again. Does “IP ready” sound like a familiar refrain from your vendors? Network enabled devices are a major push among campus and corporate identity and transaction providers. Now that your transaction points are on the network, who has more swing, your vending provider or your IT department?

For those of us with backgrounds in physical identity, Dick Hardt’s presentation on the emergence of Identity 2.0 provides a good introduction. He’s the founder & CEO of Sxip Identity (pronounced “skip”) and a respected voice in the identity conversation. Even if you don’t care much about identity, it’s a great lesson on how to give an engaging presentation.

http://www.identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/

Now that Dick caught your attention, take a look at this white paper released a couple weeks back by Open Authentitication. This industry group is focused on creating an interoperable structure for authentication. Familiar campus card names like HID, Indala, Gemplus, ActivCard, and others are teaming up with with a wide range of other infrastructure providers. Online authentication is the attention grabber, but the goal is cohesive authentication for a number of tokens (cards, fobs, PDAs, cell phones, PCs, etc…) across a range of transactions, like online payments, mobile commerce and website authentication. Payment authentication is right in line with campus card functions. Check it out for a look ahead.

http://www.openauthentication.org/resources.asp