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.
