I spoke today with Scott Kveton, a former developer with deadpooled open-ID startup Vidoop, about the startup, Urban Airship, he and 3 other fellow ex-Vidoopers launched today to assist iPhone developers with push notifications and iPhone storekit provisioning (you can find a comprehensive story about the fall of Vidoop here). iPhone app developers can outsource these cloud-based services to Urban Airship, which will focus primarily on the iPhone for now but will aim to provide support for other mobile devices in the future.

Kveton says that he along with his former colleagues saw a gap in the industry where developers could get bogged down in the nitty gritty development issues concerning push notifications to the iPhone and updating content to apps. The service will handle the delivery of notifications to Apple, will provide aliases for your users so you can send specific messages to users, and will create a web interface to send targeted or broadcast messaging for updates or other information.

Urban Airship’s iPhone StoreKit Provisioning service will host content for in-app transactions and content updating, will keep an application’s download size small by offloading content to their servers, will provide updates to an app’s users when the developer changes content, will create a catalog of content that can be updating at anytime, and can be integrated with the startup’s push service to alert users when an app’s catalog changes. Urban Airship’s first client, Subatomic Studios, which developed the Fieldrunners app, is using Urban Airship to help update and deploy new maps to its app, so users can enjoy additional map interfaces once they’ve exhausted existing levels.

Kveton says that they are targeting the iPhone market because its the most mature at the moment. But as developers add more apps to the Palm Pre, Blackberry and Andoid, Urban Airship hopes to provide services for these devices down the line. Urban Airship is still formatting its pricing model and provides technology that is only compatible with Apple’s updated iPhone 3.0 OS, which was announced today and will be rolled out to the public next week.

From CEO Joel Norvell to Vidoop insiders, where he says that the company has no funds to pay wages or other liabilities, and that employees are being offered computers in lieu of wages:

Vidoopsters:

I am currently working with our counsel on next steps, but here is
what I know:

Vidoop LLC is officially out of business. Unfortunately, there are no
funds to pay the unpaid wages or other liabilities. I don’t yet know
if this means there will be a bankruptcy filing. However, we are in
the process of winding down and vacating the office.

Tomorrow and Friday we will be offering certain equipment such as
laptops and desktop computers to employees in lieu of a certain amount
of wages owed. As an example, a laptop might be worth $1000 in back
wages. You would only need to pay taxes on the actual book value of
the asset, which might be $250. So you would write a check for $0.153
on $250, or $38.25. The company’s liability to you would be reduced by
$1000, and you would have a laptop for $38.25.

The investors who walked out of the May 5 deal created a situation
that made an orderly shutdown impossible. However, several of us have
worked nonstop to preserve everyone’s stake in Vidoop, and efforts are
ongoing. We hope to provide details soon.

Thanks to everyone who is volunteering their time to help shut down
the office. There is simply no roadmap for a situation like this, and
I know it is frustrating. Your support during this difficult period
is very much appreciated.

Joel

It’s not clear how long the Vidoop service will remain active. The company promised “plenty of warning” of a shutdown of MyVidoop on May 14, but since then have been silent. There’s a ton of speculation in the email string (we aren’t posting most of it), but we’ll wait for an official company announcement. There’s also likely an interesting backstory around that “investors who walked out of the May 5 deal” statement.

We’ve put Vidoop in the deadpool.

UPDATE: Here’s a comprehensive story of Vidoop’s fall from former employee Chris Messina.

As a reminder, OpenID is a decentralized, distributed single sign-on method that allows users to log onto many services with the same digital identity. That identity can be one of your current profiles on the web, in case the company you registered it with is an OpenID provider.

Most of the major players on the Internet are currently providers, including such companies as MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, AOL, and many more, but very few of them have actually become a relying party as well (which would allow someone to log onto Yahoo with their AOL id, for example).

About a year ago, Michael argued that companies who make a lot of noise when they become providers but don’t move (quickly enough) to also become relying parties could be exploiting the project for PR reasons and take the gain without the pain.

And truth be told, not much has changed since then, even if usage seems to be swinging upwards. Most of the big names that are issuing OpenID parties have yet to support the project by allowing users to effectively be able to sign in to their services with third-party digital identities. The big exception – surprisingly – is Facebook, the first big network that will truly embrace OpenID even if it has a service that competes directly with it (Facebook Connect). For more perspective on that, you should go read the guest post Facebook Connect and OpenID Relationship Status: “It’s Complicated”.

Anyway, Messina and I talked about the current state of OpenID, the love from Facebook, how he hopes the government will once become a massive relying party, the challenges ahead and more specifically if OpenID has a chance against Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Twitter Connect, etc.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4543100&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

As of yesterday afternoon, AOL has implemented Vidoop’s visual authentication system as part of its OpenID initiative, which was formally launched in February 2007.

Vidoop, a startup that replaces usernames and passwords with image grids, partnered with AOL to provide its OpenID users with an extra layer of security. This delivers Vidoop a potential user base of about 100 million users.

Unfortunately, AOL is still just an issuer of OpenID accounts – not a relying party. So users can’t actually use the same Vidoop-protected OpenID accounts that AOL has given them to actually sign into AOL services. AOL and other big internet players have yet to step up and become relying parties, a move that will be necessary to push OpenID into the mainstream.

Vidoop offers an alternative to the traditional username/password login system by displaying images in a grid with associated letters. Upon initial registration, users define 3-5 image categories (cars, dogs, flowers, houses, etc). When they sign into a site, a variety of images appear in a randomly-generated grid, and users enter the corresponding letters to their pre-defined categories. Because this visual system requires a higher level of intelligence, it’s harder to steal someone’s login information and use it to access all OpenID-enabled sites with it.

The implementation of authentication security can be cost-prohibitive, but Vidoop actually tries to help its partners make money. Advertisements are randomly dispersed throughout the image grid, and revenue from them is split in two ways.

Vidoop has also partnered with Charles Schwab Retirement and hopes more financial organizations will follow suit. Clickpass, a popular OpenID initiative covered here, partnered with Vidoop this past March. The startup brought Scott Kveton, the Chairman of the OpenID foundation, onboard in February.

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.

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 for the gas station 76 in the screenshot above). Currently, Vidoop sells spots directly to advertisers and the ads are simple image overlays. However, the company is developing an API so that ad networks can channel their content into the grid. Vidoop is also working on interactive overlays with product and service offers that are tailored to users’ locations and preferences (see the map for finding local gas stations below).

The advertising potential of the Vidoop authentication system promises to benefit not only Vidoop but its partner sites as well, which is where today’s announcement comes into play. Starting January 1st, Vidoop will pay partner sites 1/100th of a cent every time someone uses myVidoop to sign into their sites. So, if you are a site owner who has 5,000 logins per day through myVidoop, you’ll get only $15 per month. But if you can persuade 1M of your users to log in with myVidoop every day, you’ll earn $3,000 per month.

Payments will only be doled out when users with OpenID accounts provided by Vidoop sign into your site, not when they simply use myVidoop’s password keychain functionality to authenticate with your proprietary username/password scheme. Nor will you make any money if the user opts for an OpenID account provided by someone else. For these reasons, it’s a bit hard to predict when (or if) the myVidoop revenue-sharing system will ever become attractive enough to yield mass adoption (although sites merely need to allow for OpenID authentication and sign up with Vidoop to begin collecting revenue).

OpenID usage in general will need to reach a critical mass before sites can expect to earn a decent amount of money through Vidoop partnerships. However, the company believes that this critical mass could be around the corner, especially if several of the big players (such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in addition to AOL) begin providing OpenIDs to their users. The push for decentralized social networking through the likes of OpenSocial may require these companies to support a universal authentication system, and OpenID would be a natural choice. Vidoop stands to gain from widespread adoption since increased awareness of OpenID would cause more users to sign up for Vidoop. However, increased awareness would also heighten concerns about the security of universal authentication systems, and consequently make Vidoop’s patent-pending visual authentication scheme more attractive to both users and sites alike.