MyID.is: know who you are talking to

Written on 30th January 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.

This week we’re interviewing Charles Nouÿrit, founder and CEO of French start-up MyID.is. Since Matt Colebourne from CoComment asked us to do so.

MyID.is aims to certify your digital identity and to allow you to claim all your websites, blogs and on-line profiles. So that you can manage your on-line reputation. They we’ll be going in private alpha pretty soon.

How did you come up with the idea of MyID.is?

“Well, I was at a family dinner with my parents and sister. While we were eating, my father asked me what would be hot in 2008. I told him video, microblogging, social networks and since it was at the time that Kathy Sierra had her death threats problem, I came out with Digital ID Certification. As a matter of fact any attempt to certify digital identies so far was very complicated and couldn’t be deployed on a larger scale. So the idea just popped-out like that. I stayed at the dinner for another 30 minutes, then I left in a rush to put my idea on paper.

After 15 days of checking the validity of the certification process with two friends that became my partners in this new venture, I came out naked on my blog on April, 1st announcing what I was willing to do. I was amazingly surprised by the response of the French community that started talking about it everywhere, so it became imperative to create the company and start developing the platform. After eight months of development and wasting four other months with UK banks, we’re almost ready to launch the private alpha version in a few weeks.” (more…)

five questions for start-ups, france, identity, myID.is, trust, verification

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