Novell Views Digitalme as Infomediary Enabler.

Novell Inc views its Digitalme personal privacy technology, which we mentioned yesterday as an enabling technology for the upcoming breed of so-called infomediaries - companies like PrivaSeek Inc that act as data repositories of personal information that can be used by online marketers but controlled by users - but Novell has no plans to become an infomediary itself. The first two testers of the technology, Citibank and First USA point the way to future takers of the technology as banks and other institutions look to become enablers of internet commerce. Digitalme is based on Novell Directory Services (NDS) - you need NDS to create a Digitalme meCard but do not need it to receive one. The Java applet can be sent via email to anyone, regardless of whether they work in an NDS environment or not. There is also a messaging component, provisionally called 'Whenever' that enables chat and other messaging between users of the Digitalme client. The technology supports the Internet Mail Consortium's vCard spec and the company is looking at other privacy specs such as the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) or Open Profiling Specification (OPS). Novell will establish a server at digitalme.com as a proof of concept. The client will be free, but the server, called an Identity server, will be the revenue generating element for Novell. In addition the company hopes Digitalme will spread the NDS gospel. Digitalme uses XML to present data stored in NDS directories. Users will be able to set policies to control which information in the meCard is made available to web marketers and e-commerce sites through a personal proxy service. This detects whether a user has been to a web site before and if so offers the ability to fill in all the forms automatically, should the users want to do so. The company says it is still working out details of what it means by open source development for Digitalme, but there will some sort of web site where code can be downloaded and returned on a copyleft licensing model. It is currently in what the company calls preview mode and the roll out date is undecided, but likely within the next six months - it will depend on the success of the open source development cycle. Digitalme is being used this week by the 6,000 or so attendees of its annual BrainShare meeting. http://www.digitalme.com