Since “Minority Report”, where Tom Cruise toted a squishy bag full of spare eyeballs around to hold up in front of iris scanners, thus fooling the access systems, biometrics has been a buzzword, if only a minor one, but it has failed to catch on in a meaningful way. A few years back I speculated that this is because every existing biometric method has serious drawbacks. Fingerprints fade as you grow older, and some people don’t have any because they are afflicted with a rare disease  called “Naegeli syndrome” or dermatopathia pigmentosa reticularis (DPR) that can cause vexing social problems. Recently, two identical twins were indicted for robbing the department store KdW in Berlin, but had to be released when the authorities found that it was impossible to determine which of them had been actually done the heist since they share the same DNA. And many people instinctively refuse to put their eye to an iris scanner because they worry that they may be blinded by a flash of light from a malfunctioning machine.

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I recently had a cup of coffee with a couple of interesting youngsters from Hamburg, Christian Evers and Philipp Spethmann, who have set themselves a truly impressive goal. They are out to wrest nothing less than the control of German desktops from giants like iGoogle, T-Online, Yahoo! & Co. And they believe the way to do this is by providing consumers a safe and simple way to log onto their favorite websites.

Their company, founded two years ago with money from Ammer Partners, one of Germany’s big venture funds (yes, there still are functioning venture funds over here; many of them, in fact), is called “allyve” (pronounced “alive”), and they describe their product as “the keyring of the Internet.” What it boils down to is a set of widgets that provide single sign-on – they prefer the term “open authentication” – to a pre-defined list of favorite online sites. This in not the kind of OA that the OATH initiative is propounding; in fact allyve seems to be intent on doing things their own way instead of following the standards path (open or not). Good luck, I say.

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In early 2008, I asked my colleagues at Kuppinger Cole + Partner for leave of absence in order to take a “Sabbatical”, a kind of timeout. No, not because of burnout or anything dramatic like that, but rather because distance tends to sharpen your perspective, and I was worried that I was getting too wound up in the nitty-gritty of Identity Management as a specialized field.

As a more or less non-technical person, I had begun to believe that the issues addressed by this industry are much wider than many of us seem to realize. And in order to truly appreciate what is going on I felt I needed to take a step back.

In “Through the Looking-Glass”, Lewis Caroll describes a world on the other side of the mirror which closely resembles our own, but is subtly different.”How would you like to live in Looking-glass House?”, little Alice asks her kitten. While it appears to look just like the world on this side, “it may be quite different on beyond”, she speculates.

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