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?"

I am at Digital Identity World this week, which is taking place in San Francisco. If you are attending, too, please do feel free to intercept me for a chat.

This afternoon, I'll be on Kaliya Hamlin's panel on The Convergence of Internet-scale Identity Systems. We'll discuss the output of yesterday's strategic planning exercise that involved looking at a lot of possible future events relating the the adoption (or lack thereof) in the market of identity technologies. This was rather interesting, and I hope we'll do a reasonable job distilling those down during the panel.

Update: The ID Commons wiki now has a wiki page that lists the various events we looked at yesterday that may or may not happen in the future.

Update: The IRC backchannel is didw at Freenode.

The OSIS Project, that I helped found, is conducting a User-Centric Identity Interoperability Demonstration event tonight at the Burton Group's Catalyst conference.

NetMesh will be participating, along with a host of tier-one vendors (see list in press release) and open-source projects. Using a customer application, we will be showing a novel kind of Relying Party that supports both URL-based (OpenID) and card-based (CardSpace etc.) identities. I will have more to say on that Relying Party technology in the weeks to come.

There's also a Burton Group Podcast on this subject that I participated in recently, with Mike Jones of Microsoft, Paul Trevithick of the Higgins Project, hosted by Gerry Gebel of the Burton Group.

It appears that all e-mail addresses @netmesh.us were off-line for some hours until just a few minutes ago. A misconfiguration on part of our ISP that took us some time to notice. (for the technically inclined, they pointed the MX records to a box that doesn't run anything on the SMTP port)

If you tried to e-mail anybody at NetMesh recently and it bounced, we apologize and hope you will resend your message.

Mike Jones (Microsoft), Paul Trevithick (Higgins Project) and myself participated in a Burton Group tele-briefing today. Burton Group is a well-respected analyst firm that has spent probably more time than any other analyst firm on digital identity. They also host the upcoming Catalyst conference.

I had the opportunity to give a brief overview over user-centric identity and why it matters to businesses' bottom line. We then talked about its primary approaches — identifier-based (OpenID) and card-based (information cards)— and attempted to explain why interoperability is important, and how the upcoming user-centric interop workshop at Catalyst will help demonstrate that these new technologies are becoming adoptable.

In the second section, Hal Lockhart (BEA) and Rich Levinson (Oracle) talked about XACML.

There is a replay of the briefing tomorrow morning, with an opportunity to ask live questions. If you are a Burton Group client, please do feel to listen in.