JanRain Brings OpenID And Other Single Sign-On Options To iPhone Apps

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular... → Learn More

The only thing more cumbersome than creating a new account at every Website you want to sign into is having to create a new account before you can enjoy an iPhone app. The Web is well on its way to solving this problem with OpenID, Facebook Connect, and other universal identity systems. And, of course, plenty of iPhone apps use Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth already. But today iPhone developers are getting a new option from JanRain: a menu of sign-in options from OpenID providers (Google, Yahoo, AOL) to Facebook Connect to Twitter.

Janrain is taking its RPX product, which is used by about 200,000 Websites and launching a developer toolkit in beta. iPhone developers will be able to use it to create a scrolling menu of sign-in options (RPX supports 16 identity platforms). Developers can pick and choose which sign-in options they want to present. Once a user picks an options, such as Google or Facebook, then the app will remember that preference the next time it is launched.

JanRain charges for its service (a few pennies/user/year at high volumes). The company raised a $3.25 million Series A last December. It started out supporting OpenID providers, but now includes other identity platforms as well.

Company: Janrain
Website: janrain.com
Funding: $19.8M

Janrain helps organizations succeed on the social web with its user management platform – a suite of products to improve user acquisition and build engagement. Janrain Engage provides social login and social sharing to enable a user to login with an existing account from over 20 different networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google, as well as share activities from the site to their social networks. Janrain Capture is a turnkey registration and social data storage solution. Janrain Federate...

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Product: iPhone 3GS
Company Apple

The iPhone 3GS, announced at WWDC on June 8, 2009, is a faster iPhone featuring a 3.0 megapixel camera with autofocus, video recording capabilities with editing, and increased (3X) processing speed. The 3GS is available in 16GB and 32GB, for $199 and $299, respectively. Other new features include: Digital Compass Cut, Copy, and Paste MMS (release delayed in the US) WiFi tethering (release delayed in the US) Voice Control Landscape Keyboard Spotlight Search Voice Memos

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