But let’s face it: That train is in the station. What’s next?

Also see: Forrester’s top 10 mobile trends for 2013

Analyst Bryan Hopkins gave us a peek into what Forrester thinks is next, and much of it builds on those four horseman of disruptive change. “We went a level deeper in our research by examining how today’s hot technolog[ies] create platforms for future disruption,” he wrote this morning in a blog post.

Here they are, in four groups:

End user computing technologies

1. Next-generation devices and UIs
   New sensors and new user interfaces. Think Leap Motion
2. Advanced collaboration and communication
   Think social inside, like Yammer or other social-inside-the-enterprise solutions
3. Systems of engagement
   Real-time data, in everyone’s hands. Think Roambi

Sensors and remote computing technologies

1. Smart products
   Thing that can sense, react, and communicate. Think operating system for places and buildings
2. In-location positioning
   GPS and in-building location sensors
3. Machine-to-machine networks
   Background intelligence on people and things. Think ReelyActive

Process data management technologies

1. Smart process applications and semantics
   Real business processes are a lot messier than your flow charts. Smart process apps know that.
2. Advanced analytics
   Smarter, more predictive data. Think Cloudera’s Impala tool for Hadoop
3. Pervasive BI
   People need business intelligence that comes every hour, not at the end of the month
4. Process and data cloud services
   Scalable, burstable, and cheap computing capability. PaaS, BaaS, etc. 

Infrastructure and application platforms

1. Big data platforms
   Infrastructure to handle big data and high speed … and use all that data you’ve been uselessly storing
2. Breakthrough storage and compute
   Yes, hardware may still be necessary, even if you’re never going to be like Google
3. Software-defined infrastructure
   Software that dynamically routes your networking and data center capabilities
4. Cloud application frameworks
   Technologies for deploying and running distributed apps in the cloud, like, perhaps, a multi-continent-spanning database
5. New identity and trust models
   New federated trust and identity models for a changing world of jobs and careers … and maybe even killing all usernames and passwords

An interesting thought for executives:

If you want a good look at the future of end user computing technologies and sensor and remote computing devices, check winning Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns in the technology and gadget categories. And for a picture of the future for the last two groups above, process data management and infrastructure and application platforms, look at Google and Facebook.

photo credit: ginnerobot via photopin cc

Tarun Wadhwa is a research fellow with Singularity University and a researcher with the Hybrid Reality Institute.

On Saturday, The Washington Post Editorial Board jumped into a center of a decades-old debate by declaring their support for the creation of a universal national identity card.  Their argument, that the problem of illegal immigration cannot be solved with enforcement alone, is sound.  But their conclusion, that these problems can somehow be fixed by mandating a new type of document, is both shortsighted and misguided.

In reality, the process of implementing an American national identity card would be an expensive logistical and bureaucratic nightmare – and its usage alone wouldn’t bring about the types of reforms that legislators have been promising.

That’s because the problems with our broken outdated identity systems run deeply; they cannot be fixed with the “Band-Aid” approach that Washington is so fond of using.  The foundation of our system is built on top of a numbering scheme that was created in the 1930s for an entirely different purpose.  Adding strict requirements for a new identity document on top of an already dysfunctional system wouldn’t be anything more than a superficial, political solution.

Instead of spending the money to create new government departments to manage, protect, and update the records of over 300 million people, we’d be far better served by modernizing, cleaning, and standardizing the systems and databases that are already in use.

In this country, we have given the responsibility of maintaining records and issuing identity cards to state and local governments, and let each handle it their own way.  As a result, our nation’s systems are only as strong as their weakest link.  This practice was supposed to foster innovation, but instead it has lead to messy patchwork of restrictions and regulations that has undermined the credibility of the entire system.

The Bush Administration realized that creating national standards was critical to shoring up the whole system.  With the REAL ID Act of 2005, they instituted a de facto national identity system by mandating that records be centralized and state-issued IDs be brought up to a common standard.  When the legislation was ultimately implemented, it was done with virtually no public debate or input from important stakeholders (like the state governments who now have to deal with the new requirements).  How these programs are implemented sometimes matter more than how they are designed – unhappy state legislatures are still dragging their feet to meet the requirements over seven years later.

But there’s a lot more that can be done to fix the system now besides just making new laws.  In the last decade, several technologies have advanced to a point where they can now be used quite effectively to help state and local governments overhaul their systems.

Some of the largest inefficiencies in our systems occur because information stored in different government databases is not being shared properly.  With the plummeting cost of storing and transmitting data, sharing information has become much more practical.  Biometric identification is alsohelping counties to automatically weed through the fake, duplicate, and fraudulent entries with a speed and precision not before possible.  US-VISIT, the Department of Homeland Security’s biometric entry program, has also shown how this technology can scale and be effective in every day usage.

These changes can be deployed immediately, while a new identity system can take a long time to gain traction (if it ever does at all).  The longer a system is in place, the harder it is to change, and that is especially true when you’re dealing with something at the core of so many basic government functions.

At the same time, the very basis for identification systems are changing from improving government functions to enabling citizen services.  The identification needs of today’s citizens are more sophisticated than ever before – a physical card with their name is no longer sufficient; citizens need a portable, secure way to identify who they are both online and offline.

We may be reaching a point where the systems behind an identity card are becoming more important than the token itself.  The question of what type of card you are using is becoming more irrelevant everyday.  If we can improve our systems, we may be able to reap many of the benefits of having a national identity card without the burden or cost of actually having to implement one.

Expect legislators to tell us in great detail why this is not possible.  They will point to how divided we are, how large our population is, and explain to us that we’ll be fine if we don’t take action.  But while we are making these excuses, countries in the developing world are doing incredible things with their ID systems.  India is collecting biometric data from over one billion residents to issue them each a unique identification number.  Indonesia is made up of 17,000 islands – they just enrolled over one hundred million people into a new identity system in less than a year.  Ghana just broke a world record by biometrically registering and verifying 13 million people in just 48 hours.

Improving our identity systems should be a national priority – regardless of what happens with immigration reform.  Every single day people are inconvenienced, marginalized, and find themselves victims of identity theft because of our country’s faulty identity systems.  The American people deserve better than to be presented with a false choice.  They shouldn’t have to choose between trusting in a relic from the last century that keeps failing them, and being forced into carrying an experimental document they don’t need.

photo credit: Christi Nielsen via photopin cc

Tyfone provides secure mobile financial transactions and identity solutions. Its products include a mobile banking platform, a mobile wallet, identity management, contactless near-field communication (NFC), applications to bolster marketing campaigns, as well as complementary hardware products. Tyfone has over 50 issued and pending patents. By striking a partnership with the Portland-based company, the U.S. government can leverage the technology to serve national security.

In a statement, Technology VP at In-Q-Tel Jay Emmanuel said “We believe that Tyfone’s technology has the potential to address a wide range of complex government and commercial secure identity challenges.” Read the press release.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sprint has launched an innovative new service that could replace long and hard-to-remember phone numbers with simple names.

The service is called StarStar Me, and plays off the unique * character on phones that activates special features via “star codes” such as *69 to return the most recent call. For StarStar Me, pressing the star key twice followed by a name will connect you to that person.

For example, you could dial **John, if I was a Sprint customer set up with the $3/month option, to instantly connect with me. And you can do it whether or not you’re on Sprint — callers can also be Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T subscribers.

StarStar Me is an innovative service and a step in the right direction.

Why, really, should any of us have to know, or even have to save into our mobile devices, a long, complex series of digits in order to connect to another individual? It’s an archaic holdover from the early days of telephony when telephone numbers were actually a code that related to your physical location on the grid.

Moving to a system where identity supersedes specific details of technology is a good thing.

It’s what Apple is doing with iMessage, tying multiple modes of connection (emails, phone number) to one person, and delivering a message regardless of which device it actually arrives on. Google has been doing something similar for years with Grand Central, now Google Voice, which ties all your phones together with one number so that, regardless of whether you are using your mobile phone, office phone, or a temporary SIM with a different number while traveling, friends and colleagues can contact you with one number.

Eventually, these models should take the next step, similar to Sprint’s StarStar Me service: remove the number and simply tie an identity (name, username, handle) to a variety of accounts: some cellular, some email, some other communication modalities. But an identity system cannot easily be federated between multiple islands of corporate groupings.

That’s one reason why Sprint’s StarStarMe will have a tough go.

StarStar Me is provided by a mobile marketing company called Zoove, the “exclusive provider of StarStar numbers for the largest wireless operators in the United States.” You can bet that mobile giants Apple and Google both want to own identity and are not going to support a relatively small mobile marketing company’s identity system. Not when Apple has iMessage and Google has Voice, as well as possibly an iMessage/BBM competitor.

Even though they are not carriers, they may have a better chance of succeeding because identity is more than a phone number, and StarStar Me — being carrier-centric — is oriented primarily around phone numbers.

More challenges include the fact that Sprint will be charging $3/month for the service, meaning that you can have a simple identity … but it’ll cost you $36/year. I think that’s a non-starter for most consumers, and that identity should be baked into the platform. In addition, the service is voice-centric, lacking an SMS story beyond being configurable to automatically send a text message to a caller when you’re busy, and not even touching email.

StarStar Me sounds great. Someone needs to bring our islands of identity together in a comprehensive, universal way … or provide a DNS-like identity service that connects them all.

I just don’t think it’s going to be StarStar Me.

photo credit: Adam Foster | Codefor via photopin cc

Hat tip: TechCrunch

As reported by Inside Facebook, some Facebook Power Editor users (Power Editor is an advanced Facebook ad creation tool) saw the matching feature temporarily today:

Source: Inside Facebook

Facebook customer and identify matching tool

Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that this is a real product, explaining that businesses will be able to upload their customer lists (email addresses, phone numbers, and user IDs) to Facebook in an encrypted form, where they will be compared with Facebook’s user data, also in an encrypted form. The upshot of the process is that without the company getting access to all your Facebook data, and without Facebook getting access to the data that the company has about you, a link will be created between your identity with the company, and your identity on Facebook.

Which will allow the company to target you in Facebook ads tailored to what it knows about you … and tailored to what Facebook knows about you.

For example, Amazon could market books to you by authors you’ve already read. Or Target, knowing you’re already on its email subscriber list, might invite you to become a Facebook fan. Using Facebook ad technology, they could also tailor their message to married women ages 25-45 with children, knowing them to be heavy purchasers of home supplies.

Your privacy is maintained, in some sense: neither party that you gave information to is sharing it with the other party.

But users might well ask how much good that will do, when the process by which privacy is maintained enables companies to do basically anything they would be able to do if they had your full data.

According to Facebook, the feature is in private testing now but will be available next week.

I for one am expecting some user resistance to the new targeting technology … and, more likely than not, a fairly strong response from governmental privacy watchdogs in Europe and America.

photo credit: Christi Nielsen via photo pin cc

Tim Bray, the Googler most famous for his prior role in editing the XML language, has set his eyes on a new challenge: eradicating usernames and passwords, at least as we know them today, from the Internet.

Bray, who landed at Google in 2010 as an evangelist for the Android platform, announced Friday that he will be joining Google’s Identity group on July 1 to work on OAuth and OpenID, two standards for user authentication in web and mobile applications.

Inspired by his recent work on Google Play services (a soon-to-launch platform that offers app developers ways to integrate with Google products), Bray believes the current systems for user authentication are outdated and overly complex.

“Usernames and passwords generally suck and obviously don’t scale to the Internet, so we need to do away with them soonest,” Bray said of his latest fascination. “The new technology coming down the pipe, OAuth 2 and friends, is way too hard for developers; there need to be better tools and services if we’re going to make this whole Internet thing smoother and safer.”

What Bray will do to solve the username/password problems of today we don’t yet know (we asked, and we’ll update this post if/when we hear back). Sure, some skeptics may posit that he’s simply working on a Facebook Open Graph-like system for Google services, but maybe there’s more to his new gig.

“No doubt in my mind that this is one of the big problems to be solved for the industry over the next decade,” tech pundit John Gruber wrote on his popular Daring Fireball blog. “Bray’s two-point bullet list is exactly right: the username/password solution is bad for users in numerous ways, but whatever eventually replaces it needs to be easy for developers.”

Photo credit: Shutterstock

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Frustration.

That’s the dominant note sounded by commenters at this week’s Mobile Summit, an invitation-only conclave of mobile-industry executives and investors sponsored by VentureBeat.

It’s polite frustration, to be sure. But again and again, I’ve heard on-stage speakers or members of the audience in various discussions allude to their difficulties working with carriers, with Apple, with Google, or with the vast profusion of platforms out there.

One hundred and eighty executives and investors came to the Mobile Summit at scenic Cavallo Point, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, for a one-and-a-half-day discussion of the biggest themes facing the mobile industry. Judging from various show-of-hands questions, I’d say about half the audience represented startups making apps of one kind or another. There was a smaller but very influential segment of carrier and infrastructure providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Cisco. Larger corporations, many offering enterprise services, were also in attendance, including Google, Salesforce, Box, Intuit, and more. A swath of venture capitalists looking for opportunities rounded out the crowd.

Many of the conversations were tinged with annoyance at the lack of infrastructure in certain key areas, such as geolocation services. In other cases, such as mobile payments, there’s such a wide diversity of options that it’s hard to know which horse to bet on. And one recurring theme was the high cost of customer acquisition and the difficulty of retaining customers, especially for apps.

As I’ve written before, the mobile industry is still highly fragmented, and it’s about to get worse. A lot has happened in the past five years, since the debut of the iOS and Android platforms. The playbooks that worked before were torn up, and new ones have not yet been written.

To take just one example, carriers used to control virtually every aspect of the mobile ecosystem, from the devices you could buy to the software you could run on them. Now they no longer control the operating systems or the apps. In some cases they don’t even control which devices can access their networks. Carriers have had to embrace innovation and openness to a far higher degree than before; Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint all now have innovation hubs aimed at making it easier for companies to create apps and devices that work on their networks.

Despite their efforts, carriers are still not moving fast enough, said Amber Case, founder of GeoLoqi, a geolocation toolkit provider, at the Mobile Summit. (Speaking from the crowd, AT&T’s senior executive VP of technology, John Donovan, took exception to that statement, and pointed out the many ways AT&T has embraced innovation and is trying to enable faster development and deployment on its network.)

But frustration is a signal of opportunity to savvy entrepreneurs and smart corporations, which is why the other big theme of this summit is entrepreneurial hunger.

In other words, the mobile industry presents a perfect entrepreneurial combination of chaos and uncertainty.

Smartphone usage has rocketed. Since 2008, an app economy has emerged that didn’t exist before, opening never-before-seen opportunities for even the tiniest of companies to reach out to mobile customers directly. Enterprises are struggling with a flood of portable devices they can’t control as easily or as completely as they could with Windows PCs.

And, thanks to the wide variety of platforms, devices, and carriers out there, just getting things to work in a predictable way is often a huge challenge, particularly for smaller companies and startups with limited resources.

Here are just a few of the areas where mobile infrastructure is lacking or fragmented, and where there are potentially huge opportunities for companies that can solve these problems:

Source: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

Executives networking at VentureBeat's Mobile Summit 2012 at Cavallo Point in Sausalito, Calif.

Geolocation: GPS and other location-tracking technologies are now built into every smartphone, making it possible, in theory, to build amazing new apps that take advantage of your location. But there are still difficulties with accuracy and speed, as well as the reliability of getting a GPS signal. Plus, there’s no real ecosystem around location-based services: Every app has to build its own set of location services and use location in its own way.

Mobile payments: There are literally dozens of mobile payment providers, including mobile point-of-sale devices, mobile wallets. Many of these are not widely accepted yet, and are implemented inconsistently between devices (only a minority of phones in the U.S. yet support NFC, for instance). That makes it a challenge for anyone who wants to take or make payments via phone.

Car interfaces: Mercedes showed off a very slick SLS AMG (a $200,000 sports car) with a built-in, Android-based dashboard display. Ford has long had its own Sync system (powered by Microsoft) that integrates with many smartphones. GM has its OnStar network, which can be used by third parties to offer additional services (for example, RelayRides, a peer-to-peer car rental service, takes advantage of OnStar to let renters unlock and start a car via their phones). The problem is all of these systems are incompatible. If you want to make a car-oriented app for a smartphone or tablet, you need to customize it for each car maker, and in some cases for specific models.

Identity management: Smartphones and tablets are increasingly becoming the primary computing devices used by employees. In some cases, IT departments issue tablets to new employees instead of PCs. The difficulty is that with these devices, most of the data resides in the cloud, not on the device itself, creating new security and management issues for IT. In a way, this turns the old security issue (locking down individual PCs) into an identity management issue (making sure that people are who they say they are, and giving them access to cloud data and apps accordingly). Solving this problem could also create new consumer opportunities, by turning phones into authentication devices that help you identify yourself in a wide variety of contexts (your home, your office, your car, etc.).

Enterprise device management: As enterprises deploy tablets and smartphones to their employees, they also need a way to manage those devices appropriately. The challenge is you can’t just impose total control on these devices, as you could with PCs — particularly if the employees are bringing their own devices. A smartphone is simply a more personal thing, and people want the option to use Instagram or Facebook alongside the official apps, VPN, or CRM tool. How do you manage phones in such a way that allows for personal use while still keeping the enterprise apps under control?

User acquisition: This was one of the biggest topics of the Mobile Summit. Both Apple’s App Store and the Android Market have become victims of their own success. As they’ve filled up with apps, it has become harder and harder for customers to find the apps they want, and more difficult for app makers to find the customers they crave. Brian Higgins, the vice president of product innovation for Verizon Wireless, who I interviewed on Monday, had a key point: He said that one of the most important things companies hoping to work with Verizon’s innovation centers can do is figure out what channel model they plan to use. It’s no longer enough to create an awesome app and hope that customers will find you: You need to figure out distribution, too. In a fragmented world that’s controlled by the likes of Apple, Amazon, and Google, that’s not an easy question to answer.

What opportunities do you think are the most enticing to mobile entrepreneurs?

Photos by Heather Kelly/VentureBeat.

As Facebook gets ready for its monster IPO, which will likely value the company at more than $100 billion, I thought it would be valuable to take a look at some of the critical product decisions that lead to its success.

In this first part of a four-part series on how Facebook made small design decisions that had a tremendous impact, I’ll focus on identity (see links to the rest of the series below).

There was a time when Facebook and Twitter were neck-and-neck for which was going to be the dominant social network. In many ways, Twitter got it wrong.

Back in my CompuServe days, my online identity was 72457,0056. Handles aren’t that bad, but they’re not much better, either.

Real people refer to each other by names, not handles. Real people can’t remember arbitrary strings. Facebook made the right call by focusing on the names people use for each other instead of handles. (This shouldn’t we confused with the discussion of real names vs. pseudonyms.)

Although nerds, SEOs, and marketers care about getting a single letter username or being “rocky,” this isn’t a concern for a lot of regular people. A name is the most personal thing to someone, but many startups force people to give that up.

Computers need unique identifiers, but people don’t. Most people don’t have namespace collisions within their friend circles. To the extent that they do, they’re easily resolvable by context. (For example, I know two Mike McCarthys from two different companies.) Facebook has a unique identifier to address the needs of its computers, but I don’t know what mine is or the IDs that Facebook computers associate with my friends. I don’t have to.

One of my product-design mantras is “Don’t make people think like computers.” The most successful apps we use address this for us. With type-down on Gmail, I never actually have to remember someone’s email address. (My personal address on Gmail was designed deliberately such that it isn’t memorable, to prevent dictionary spam attacks.) With cell phone address books, we don’t have to remember people’s phone numbers.

Part of the reason Twitter never took off as a communications medium among the masses (versus a publishing medium) is that they’ve made it too damn hard to communicate with anyone. Twitter only searches against the handle when you start addressing someone. And the search algorithm doesn’t even make sense.

Look at this search for Carol:

For some reason, Carol matches against CharlotteHill. (All the letters are in there, but in a different order.) But if I try to enter @fuller, I get no results because Fuller isn’t in Charlotte’s handle, even though it’s part of her name.

Another problem is that Twitter only searches against the 500 most recently followed people. The other day, I wanted to meet my friend Jill Okawa Fletcher for a drink. But because I followed Jill a long time ago, she doesn’t come up when I do a search. (My friend Carol Glover doesn’t show up in the Carol search for the same reason.) This is really silly in 2012. Computing power and storage is cheap enough that you could search against the whole follower list. Google searches much larger datasets for its search suggestions.

This limitation makes it hard to communicate. And when you make something hard, people will do less of it. In many cases, they’ll say forget about it. In other cases, they’ll go to the trouble of searching Google to find the right handles, but get annoyed by it. I often Google “Twitter [real name]” to find the Twitter handle of someone I’m following. I shouldn’t have to use another product to accomplish core functions of your product.

Handles create another problem: they make it harder to onboard people. For very popular services, trying handle after handle only to find them taken creates a barrier to sign up. (My Twitter handle of rakeshlobster comes with its own back-story.) This reduces ROI on marketing dollars.

Google’s success can also be attributed to the need for people to relate with computers on people terms, not computer terms. The domain name system is unfriendly to humans. There can only be one Nissan.com, but that isn’t the car company. Google translated people’s desire to quickly find the car company, http://www.nissanusa.com/  (if you’re in the U.S.), into a $200 billion business.

Twitter is successful in its own right. But this fundamental element of product design influenced the divergent directions of Facebook and Twitter.

You can check out part 2 and 3 in this series now:

Instagram understands a secret of Facebook’s success: Visuals

Secrets of Facebook’s Success: Virality

The multi-year deal will combine MasterCard’s expertise in payment processing and commerce with Intel’s strength in chip-based security. The idea is to make checkout simpler and safer for online merchants and consumers using Ultrabooks (thin laptops like the Macbook Air) and future PCs.

The two companies will work on emerging payment technologies such as MasterCard’s PayPass and Intel’s Identity Protection Technology. The latter uses two-factor authentication and hardware-based display protection and security against malware. Consumers will be able to pay for online purchases in the future with a simple tap of a PayPass-enabled card, tag, or smartphone on an Ultrabook device.

PayPass can be used in plastic cards, mobile phones and other devices. Instead of swiping a credit card, you can simply tap on another device that contains the same technology. It is currently in use with Google’s mobile wallet service for Android mobile devices.

Ed McLaughlin, chief emerging payments officer at MasterCard, said the collaboration will focus on a simple click or tap from the consumer point of view. Online sales hit $176.2 billion last year in the U.S. and are expected to grow at double-digit rates for the next five years, according to market researcher Forrester Research. Intel’s George Thangdurai, general manger of PC Client Services at Intel, said online commerce is a key focus area for Intel. MasterCard is competing with rivals such as Visa, American Express, Discover Financial Services, and PayPal.

If you were starting your own web service, would you make people sign up for an account linked to their real-world names and faces, or would you allow them to post anonymously?

This is a debate that has raged online for a while, with strong advocates on both sides. Perhaps no one is more informed about the effects of online anonymity than Chris Poole, a.k.a. moot, the founder of anonymity-fueled community 4chan.

Poole took the stage at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today to talk about identity and anonymity, two seemingly opposed forces shaping how we represent and (if we’re lucky) discover ourselves online. The young founder, who is now pouring more energy into Canv.as, an image sharing site, was passionate and eloquent in making his case.

“I don’t see myself as an advocate for anonymity any more than an advocate for identity,” he told the audience. “But I do like having choices. It’s disturbing to me that our options are being eroded by the big players in the identity space.”

The entrepreneur came down particularly hard on Google and Facebook for foisting what he called “a fast-food version of identity” on all their users.

“Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror,” said Poole, “but we’re actually more like diamonds. Look from a different angle, and you see something completely different… Facebook is consolidating identity by making us more simple than we truly are.

“We all have multiple identities. It’s part of being human. We’re all multi-faceted people.”

Poole said he was moot, the rabble-rousing hacker. But, he noted, he’s also a son, a friend, and hopes someday to be a spouse and parent. And that portrait is a lot more complex than anonymous or identified, “real life” or “cyberspace.”

“The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white,” he said. Facebook says you have one identity; anonymity represents something chaotic online… But you can incorporate identity without asking users to make sacrifices.”

Poole says each user represents something unique to each group he connects with online, and sometimes, it’s important to choose an appropriate representation for the part of yourself you’re expressing in a particular forum.

“Picking my AOL screen name when I was a kid took four hours… it was a representation of who I was. If you go to any hacker con and ask someone what their nae is, they give you a handle. That’s the name they identity with — the name they chose themselves.”

Poole says Twitter does a great job of handling anonymity, identity and all the shades of gray between. “There’s a rich form of communication that takes place because the stream is interest-driven, not identity-driven,” he said. “And its apps support multiple accounts. Personal, business, and the whole spectrum between.”

By contrast, Poole said of Google+, “I think [Google] missed a huge opportunity to innovate by following the same principles that Facebook set up.”

He said in the past, he had told some Facebook staff that their company “sets the bar in terms of identity and privacy online, and everybody follows suit.” However, Poole now thinks differently about that.

“We set the bar as users of the web,” he told the audience at Web 2.0 Summit, “and we’re quickly approaching this fork in the road. We’re about to sacrifice something valuable and special.”

Finally, Poole challenged both creators and users of web services to consider the following each time they make a new product or sign up for one: “Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I wonder what the web would look like if we did it right.”

miiCard is like an online passport or driver’s license, proving your identity. To get a miiCard, you register and verify your account, much like any other website registration. After the validation goes through, you have the option to attach accounts to your miiCard, such as your bank account, credit accounts, social networks and utilities accounts. Adding these accounts strengthens your identify and allows miiCard to confidently confirm, you are who you say you are.

The company is trying to create a circle of trust for your online transactions, even if the seller can’t physically see proof of your identity.

“From buying and selling online to using social networks, we often need to be able to prove our identity online and in real-time.  miiCard will do that by offering an alternative to the traditional offline checks of driver’s license, passport or utility bill,” said chief executive James Varga in a statement.

According to miiCard, 70 to 90 percent of online transactions fall through when proof of identity is requested. With numbers that high, this probably isn’t a result of sketchy buyers, but simply that the hassle of providing proof outweighs the purchase benefit. Having an ID up front will also speed up the purchase process.

And obvious concern is security for those precious accounts, which miiCard assures customers it has. Its measures include bank-level online security and authorization tactics as well as third party audits to ensure there aren’t any vulnerabilities. It runs its technology on Yodlee.

miiCard also announced that James Varga, a serial Canadian entrepreneur, would become the company’s chief executive.

Ping offers several tools to secure a company’s identity in the cloud, including PingFederate, software that allows employees and customers to access a number of online applications with a single, secure username and password. It also offers PingConnect, an online version that can integrate with popular enterprise tools like Salesforce.com. The company says the single login can increase productivity and lower help-desk and administrative costs.

Several other companies are trying to offer secure enterprise identities in the cloud, including Okta, a cloud application management tool, which received funding from well-known cloud pioneer Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture fund Andreessen Horowitz.

The Denver, Colorado-based company, founded in 2002, previously raised a first round of funding for $13 million. Investors for this round included Triangle Peak Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and existing investors Appian Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, SAP Ventures and Volition Capital.

Zuckerberg has spent a lot of time talking about his stance on identity and privacy, especially recently, as Facebook has taken more criticism for its various privacy policies. (To get the flavor of his remarks, check out VentureBeat’s post about Zuckerberg’s privacy stance from last May, as well as David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect.) He’s been pretty aggressive ins advocating that users should have a single identity that’s consistent they are online, because that encourages them to be more authentic (and also means they can carry their social connections with them to any site).

Poole, who is also known under his 4chan username “moot”, said, “I think that’s totally wrong.” He’s had plenty of opportunity to observe the pluses and minuses of anonymity in action, since 4chan is well-known for its anonymous user base. (In fact, the activist hacker group that emerged from 4chan is known as Anonymous.)

Poole argued that anonymity allows users to reveal themselves in a “completely unvarnished, unfiltered, raw way.” One of the things that’s lost when you carry the same identity everywhere is “the innocence of youth.” (“Innocence” isn’t the first word that would come to mind when I think of 4chan, but okay, I’ll go with him here.) In other words, when everyone knows everything you’ve done online, you’re a lot more worried about screwing up, and you’re less willing to experiment. Poole compared this to being a kid, moving to a new neighborhood, and having the opportunity to start over. On the Internet, if you’re not anonymous, you don’t get that opportunity.

“The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself,” Poole said.

In the case of 4chan, users feel a lot more comfortable trying to create funny images that can become memes, because content that doesn’t catch on disappears quickly, and they’re not weighed down by their failures. Poole said another benefit to 4chan’s anonymity, one that makes it very different from most other online communities, is that content becomes more important than the creator. Rather than prioritizing the most valued and experienced users, 4chan allows anyone to access the site and post something that could take off.

At the same time, it seems Poole’s attitude towards privacy has evolved. He’s working on a new community site called Canv.as, which actually integrates with Facebook Connect, although users can still post anonymously. Poole said the fact that “you know that we know” the user’s real identity, even if other users can’t see it, discourages people from indulging in the most obnoxious behavior.

The “Wild West” approach, while important for 4chan’s popularity, has had an effect on Poole’s ability to turn the site into a real business. Very few brands are willing to run their ads alongside content that’s so unpredictable and potentially offensive, he acknowledged.

Update: Online video star and fellow SXSW keynote speaker Felicia Day agrees.