Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium working to build a more trusted Internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide, today announced winners of the 2007 IDDY (Identity Deployment of the Year) Award.

This year Liberty Alliance awarded four IDDYs recognizing digital identity management applications built using Liberty’s open, privacy-respecting and proven interoperable identity specifications. Winners were announced at DIDW 2007 where eBIZ.mobility, the New Zealand Government, NTT Labs and Rearden Commerce were awarded the 2007 IDDY.

A photo of the Liberty Alliance IDDY Award is available at http://www.projectliberty.org/liberty/news_events/iddy_awards.

NetIDme OpenID Latest Developments 

Recently, lots of our clients and partners have been asking about the development of CardSpace technology, & how it will work in reality. We like to think of it as a ‘virtual wallet’ that sits on you PC, and allows you to select a virtual card that is appropriate for a particular transaction. An important benefit is that it’ll help to reduce the amount of personal data that is held about you by third parties, as you will be able to choose the card that contains the relevant information.

For example, a NetIDme card will contain details that allow you to prove your identity online where necessary, but it will not contain any of your financial details, so if you are purchasing something online, you would choose a card from your ‘virtual wallet’ that has been issued by your bank.

The Microsoft CardSpace site has great information, here’s a snippet… 

CardSpace will provide consumers with a simpler and safer digital identity experience. It will provide a common way for people to manage their digital identities; a common way of increasing the assurance that the party asking for a users digital identity is who they say they are. (more)

Find out more about NetIDme OpenID, another important emerging technology.

Internetnews.com announces that the first meeting of the concordia project will take place later this month. In a move intended to enable competing identity management technologies to interoperate, a new forum will hold a key meeting in San Francisco on June 26 to find out first hand what users want.

The forum aims to provide a neutral ground for competing identity management players to communicate with each other and with customers in a venue that looks toward tearing down barriers to interoperability between their systems. The Concordia project is a global initiative designed to drive interoperability across identity protocols in use today. Representatives from Liberty Alliance, Microsoft and OpenID will participate in the forum.