The little mouse is growing up. The Higgins project today announced the first official release, V1.0.

Congratulations to Paul, Mary, and the entire Higgins team!

Courtesy of Paul Madsen:

Two CIOs go into a bar. The first guy says to the second ‘How’s it going?’.

Second guy says ‘Sso-sso’.

Lee Dryburgh is putting together what appears to become an awsome conference on the future of the telecommunications industry called eComm2008. It is modestly subtitled "the trillion dollar re-think" — but that’s exactly what it looks like that it will be. It takes place March 12-14 at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

I’ll do a very quick talk on: "The Telco as an Identity Provider: the Perfect Match?"

William Heath writes:

Suppliers abandon the NIS and smart money heads to OpenID

[The NIS being the National Identity Scheme in the UK.]

If that came to pass, what’s next for OpenID? World revolution?

Have you ever wondered how serious "the big guys" are about supporting OpenID in practice, instead of just talking about it as a good thing? While nothing is as convincing as shipping interoperable code, the OpenID Foundation announced this morning that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign all have not only joined the OpenID Foundation, but will serve on the foundation’s board of directors.

This is incredibly good news for OpenID, the foundation, and for OpenID, the movement. Probably the biggest news it could create, ever …

So the OpenID Foundation board of directors will look like this going forward:

• Martin Atkins, community member (independent)
• Artur Bergman, community member (Wikia)
• Johannes Ernst, community member (NetMesh) and yours truly
• Dick Hardt, community member (Sxip)
• Mike Jones, corporate member (Microsoft)
• Gary Krall, corporate member (VeriSign)
• Scott Kveton, community member (now with Vidoop)
• Tony Nadalin, corporate member (IBM)
• David Recordon, community member (Six Apart)
• Drummond Reed, community member (Cordance, Parity)
• Bill Washburn, executive director, OpenID Foundation
• N.N., corporate member (Google)
• N.N., corporate member (Yahoo!)

Note that there are more community members than there are corporate members, which should help keep the board firmly in tune with the community.

As you might suspect, this announcement was in the works for a long time; I’m afraid it was the better part of a year. (Whenever has anybody managed to get 5 giants do anything at the same time?). I’d like to particularly thank Scott, David and Bill, who worked at this for a long time.

Admittedly it is still a bit hard for me to believe that what is arguably many of the technology’s leading companies are getting behind OpenID. What a little URL can do …