Yahoo announces that all 248 million registered Yahoo! users will have an OpenID by the end of the month. This triples the number of available OpenIDs and creates a major opportunity for websites when accepting them.

The OpenID Authentication 2.0 specification and the OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0 specifications are finally released. This follows intellectual property non-assertion agreements by NetMesh and other contributors to the specifications, ensuring that OpenID can be implemented without royalties by anybody.

NetMesh introduces a market, deployment-oriented model for the Identity Landscape in 2008. This follows more technology-centric models for 2006 and 2007 that were widely referenced.

Government Health IT magazine quotes NetMesh's Johannes Ernst in an article about Health 2.0, on the shift of power from vendors to users.

Johannes Ernst, founder/CEO of NetMesh, speaks at the second O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference in San Francisco on user-centric identity in the context of the Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).

Bill Gates, during his keynote speech at the RSA Conference, announced that Microsoft will support OpenID in several Microsoft products, including CardSpace.

This continues the rapid adoption of URLs for digital identity purposes, an idea hatched at NetMesh, and since supported by companies such as VeriSign, Symantec, Six Apart, Technorati, and others.

NetMesh supports OpenID in NetMesh InfoGrid, which can be used by enterprises to accept and issue OpenIDs, in the context of their existing business systems.

NetMesh's Johannes Ernst becomes a founding director of the OpenID Foundation.

The OpenID Foundation is the umbrella governance structure for the OpenID movement. Other directors include Artur Bergman (Six Apart), David Recordon (VeriSign), Dick Hardt (Sxip), Drummond Reed (Cordance), Martin Atkins (independent) and Scott Kveton (JanRain).

NetMesh's Johannes Ernst and VeriSign's David Recordon publish "The Case for OpenID", outlining the specific advantages of OpenID compared to other digital identity technologies.

The next day, the story is featured on Slashdot and an active topic in the blogosphere.

NetMesh's Johannes Ernst will speak at the Internet Identity Workshop on the Open Source Identity System (OSIS). OSIS is multi-vendor project coordinating the creation of an interoperable, multi-protocol, open-source digital identity layer for the internet from the parts produced by a number of open-source projects..

Founded by Microsoft, VeriSign and NetMesh, OSIS now also includes CA, IBM, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun and a number of startups.

Johannes Ernst, NetMesh's CEO, will be speaker at the upcoming Digital Identity World Conference. He will join Mike Graves, CTO of Verisign, and Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip to discuss "The Impact of URL-Based Identity: What Is It? And Why Should I Pay Attention?".

NetMesh is proud to co-sponsor the OpenID Bounty Program.

NetMesh joins Verisign, VeriSign, JanRain, Cordance, ooTao, Opinity, Four Kitchen Studios, Zooomr, claimID, Sxip and Six Apart to award $5000 to the first 10 open-source projects that OpenID-enable their applications.

Johannes Ernst, NetMesh's CEO will be a speaker at the Identity Mash-Up conference organized by Harvard University's Berkman Center.

The Yadis project, which was initiated by Six Apart and NetMesh, publishes version 1.0 of its interoperability specification.

Johannes Ernst, NetMesh's CEO will be participate in a panel at Microsoft's Mix '06 conference in Las Vegas, on March 21, 2006.

The panel is hosted by Kim Cameron, Microsoft's Identity Architect, and will discuss new approaches to identity management.

Following his participation as a speaker at PC Forum 2005, NetMesh's Johannes Ernst will be one of the discussion leaders in a roundtable discussion on Identity, Reputation and Attention at the prestigious PC Forum 2006 conference.

Johannes Ernst, founder/CEO of NetMesh, speaks at the inaugural O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference in San Francisco. His talk is titled "Identity Crisis: Namespaces out of control" (download slides)

NetMesh also co-hosts a BOF on User-controlled Identity.

Six Apart, and NetMesh, announced Yadis.org, a project and a technical architecture to make personal digital identity technologies interoperable.

Striving to empower users to become full participants in the Participation Age, Yadis will lay the groundwork for the interoperability of innovative identity technologies such as OpenID (invented by Six Apart) and LID (invented by NetMesh). NetMesh plans to support Yadis in its InfoGrid product and hosted mylid.net service. Six Apart plans to support Yadis for its millions of LiveJournal, Movable Type and TypeKey users.

At the O'Reilly Open Source Conference 2005, NetMesh announced the immediate availability of mylid.net, a service hosting personal digital identities.

At Digital Identity World 2005, Identity Commons, ooTao, and NetMesh announce the interoperability of i-names and LID personal digital identity technologies. Press release.

NetMesh's CEO, Johannes Ernst, will be speaking at PC Forum 2005, one of the oldest and most successful new technology conferences for executives, organized annually by Esther Dyson.

Johannes will be on a panel hosted by Rafe Needleman, a well-known technology writer, on the subject of presence and situational awareness in the enterprise.

NetMesh releases LID, a revolutionary new technology to manage digital identities for people and things in a decentralized fashion that fosters innovation.

More information at the LID website at lid.netmesh.org.