Vidoop, an OpenID identity provider reviewed here that shuns usernames and passwords in favor of picture grids, has scored a coup by managing to hire the chairman of the OpenID foundation himself, Scott Kveton. Kveton will act as Vice President of Open Platforms for Vidoop, managing the myVidoop product out of Portland. His association with Vidoop should help the company to raise its visibility and to strike deals with consumer websites that want to begin implementing OpenID authentication. Vidoop differs from other OpenID identity providers by presenting users with a grid of pictures from which they must identify a preset configuration in order to authenticate. The company is working to sign deals with advertisers to incorporate ads into the grid and pass on some of the revenues to participating websites. While OpenID has yet to gain widespread implementation, big players such as Yahoo have been showing much greater interest in the technology as of late. CrunchBase Information Vidoop Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when those words are passwords you can’t remember. An OpenID startup called Vidoop aims to replace your usernames and passwords with a grid of pictures that may contain visual advertisements. To encourage adoption of its user authentication technology, Vidoop will announce today at the Internet Identity Workshop its intention to pay affiliates, starting January 1st, for the logins to their sites that transpire under the myVidoop service. MyVidoop serves as both a password keychain for all of the sites you log into across the web, as well as an OpenID account provider. Signing into an OpenID-enabled site with myVidoop, or retrieving all of the passwords in your myVidoop keychain, involves not a username and password, but rather a visual grid of images that fall into particular categories. When you first create a myVidoop account, you pick 3-5 types of images (e.g. birds, skyscrapers, flowers, cars). Then whenever you need to authenticate with myVidoop, you simply type the letters of the images in a randomly generated grid that fall into your chosen categories. There are two main advantages to using this visual authentication system rather than a tradition username and password scheme. The first is security: because you never need to use a username and password (at least with the “pure” OpenID functionality of myVidoop – the service provides merely a layer for non-OpenID authentications), there’s no way for someone to obtain your credentials and create a robot that hacks into your accounts. Visual authentication requires that a human – or perhaps (impossibly) smart computer – comprehends the images in a grid and the categories they fall into, plus has knowledge of the categories you have chosen (and are less likely to have written down somewhere). On top of this, myVidoop only lets you authenticate on pre-approved machines so the hacker would need to be sitting at your computer, or have possession of your cell phone to undergo approval, to gain access to your myVidoop account and all its stored passwords. The second advantage is the potential for generating revenue through advertisements. The images in the login grid can be generic, or they can promote a particular brand or product just like advertisements elsewhere on the web. Vidoop has already signed six partners to advertise through its picture grid (such as ConocoPhillips and SmartUSA, a division of Daimler Benz; you’ll see an ad → Read More