It gives me great pleasure to introduce Luke Sontag, co-founder & President of Technology at Vidoop.

They have launched a beta version of their technology at myvidoop.com, Vidoop’s entry as an identity provider using the OpenID protocol. Registration is by invitation only (available to those that attended the Web 2.0 expo at Moscone center) but I do have 5 invitations so if you like what you read in this article and are interested to try out Vidoop, please send an email to sian at folksonomy dot org and I will be happy to send out invitations to the first five emails.

What is Vidoop’s story?

Our mission is, “Securing a World of Information.” Our technology is effective anywhere a username and password is used for access. Vidoop provides industrial-strength security to consumer websites, a very underserved market. Everyone has a story about being hacked, from Myspace accounts getting turned into spam bots to World of Warcraft assets being pirated and sold on eBay. Vidoop creates a security partnership with users, allowing them to be proactive in securing their online experience.

Every startup in order to be successful needs to be able to recognize and identify their challenges. What are some of the challenges you see to preventing mass-scale adoption of Vidoop’s technology?

We’re talking about a culture change, offering a simple solution that empowers users to take control of their online identities and assets. Encouraging people to take this proactive step requires a learning curve, so we have to do a good job of presenting the information. We launched myvidoop.com so that people can learn about the convenience and security of our OpenID solution so when the banks launch our licensed model, customers will be using what we hope will become a standard for secure Internet access.

Security is a major concern for anyone using the Internet. Almost 100% of authentication for the Internet is password-based, which is simply not secure. Common password policies such as character length, alphanumeric, or changing passwords are supposedly great from a security standpoint, but if keystroke-logging software is present, there is a 100% chance the password can be compromised.

At the Web 2.0 conference here in Moscone center this past week in your Launchpad keynote address, you brought up Identity 2.0. Dick Hardt of Sxip Identity immediately came to mind. Is there a relationship between Vidoop and Sxip Identity?

No there’s no relationship as of right now with Sxip, but we have been watching them and a bunch of the other guys in the OpenID movement. We have been in stealth mode over this past year so we been very vigilant about keeping things under wraps. We haven’t had an opportunity to reach out to any members in the community yet and we held back our developers from getting too involved.

But now that we’re out there, we definitely want to build relationships with these other Identity providers that are leading the OpenID movement and we want to get behind it because we whole-heartedly believe in the idea and we want to do everything we can to support it.

What is your distribution strategy/channels?

We have two distinct business models. We license our technology to the corporate world for secure network, email, and web access, where there is privacy and/or transactional risk. Myvidoop.com provides users a single sign-on to OpenID enabled websites at no cost to the user or the website. This is supported by sponsors and generates revenue for the sites that accept our login.

We want to support the growth of OpenID and hope to set the standard for online security.

We hope that people will begin asking why their email account or their social networking account is more secure than their bank account. And vice-versa.

Talking about education, how is Vidoop approaching educating the market?

There’s two ways that we’re going about educating the market. We’re working on putting together an informative website, Vidoop.com. There is limited information right now, but go and check it out. Much more content will appear in the next few weeks so come back often!

At the same time, we also aim to educate developers on the concept of OpenID, how it works, and how they can implement it on their site.

Message to Leave with:

We invite your readers to request an invitation code at myvidoop.com so they can create a free account that can be used to log in to any OpenID enabled website. We really believe that our single sign-on solution provides the convenience and security that users should demand of any website that stores private information. We welcome user feedback. Web 2.0 is about collaborative creativity, and we want users to participate in the growth and adoption of our technology. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you!