Not to disparage the iPhone, which is very cool, but I think the proliferation of Android apps and the comparability of the HTC phones coming out – including other manufacturers as well – will lead to the eventual displacement of Apple and its phone to the familiar position of loyalist niche toy. That is, the iPhone will end up as the Sony Betamax of the 21st century. Not only did Apple make a blunder through its exclusivity deal with at&t, which is too long, the proprietary nature of it technology will lose out – someone might want to tell Steve Jobs about this open source stuff. And this copy called, get this, ‘Google,’ owns Android and has an entire open source code library. OMG, indeed…

I’m not predicting Apple’s demise just yet – remember how not-so-great life was before the iPod? And while IBM’s negligence in developing software for a machine it created known as the personal computer spawned a little company called that ended up overtaking its progenitor in terms of market capitalization, Big Blue survived – of course, not by building more big mainframe computers.

“Think”: IBM’s successful slogan. Think smaller. If it gets any smaller, it might just be huge. Nice Android. Good boy…

• OpenID: This demo illustrates a consumer of OpenID capabilities. Technically, OpenID offers a distributed authentication mechanism, meaning you authenticate (i.e., login) to the site that provided you the OpenID identity. The client application (i.e., web site) accepts that OpenID provider authentication as valid; you are then ‘logged in’ to the site using that identity. Conceptually, this could lead to a wide range of practical capabilities – namely, a ubiquitous, federated, single sign on functionality. However, it is too early to tell whether or not this will fly…By the way, this site is OpenID-enabled.




• Digital Signatures: I had a client who wanted to legally enforce a commitment made over the web, and one way to do so is through the use of digital signatures using an X.509 digital certificate. This demo illustrates one way to issue a credential (i.e., digital certificate) to someone – through a registration process – and then use the issued credential to digitally sign a document. (More complexity in the registration process – such as verification of the registrant’s claim of identity or even an in-person identity vetting – increases the trust process and a number of industry standards, such as Signatures and Authentication For Everyone (SAFE), have much more stringent policies related to credential issuance.)

I intend to add more demonstrations in the future. Please visit demos periodically.