Open Identity Comes to the Government – 10 Companies in Pilot Program

This will make it much easier to connect with government agencies, National Institute of Health included. You can read more from the executive director here at the website. Hats off to the participants, as we all know the growing number of passwords and log ons continues to grow and when authentication can securely take place without having to store as much in the human memory, we are all happy! BD

Promising new startup of 2009 - Executive branch of the US federal Government

A group of ten technology and information companies on Wednesday said they will support pilot programs to make government Web sites easier to interact with, in keeping with the White House's Open Government initiative.

AOL, Acxiom, Citi, Equifax, Google (NSDQ: GOOG), PayPal, Privo, VeriSign, Wave Systems, and Yahoo said they would act as digital identity providers by supporting OpenID and Information Card technologies at government Web sites. OpenID is an authentication protocol that allows Internet users to register at different Web sites using the same OpenID user name. Information Cards provide a digital identity that can be used in conjunction with OpenID authentication.

For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to use OpenID and Information Cards to allow customized library searches, access to training materials, conference registration, and use of medical research wikis while maintaining strong privacy protections for users.