Liberty Alliance and Fidelity at 3GSM

During the February 12-15, I participated the 3GSM world congress, for the first time in my life. People have said that this is the most significant and largest event of the mobile industry. After seeing the event live, I can confirm this...

Me and my colleagues were invited to the Liberty Alliance booth to demonstrate the work that has been done in the Fidelity project. Basically, we have implemented four different circles of trust in four different European countries. So, what this practically means is that by letting the identity roam between these CoTs, the end-user is able to use services of a foreign CoT. So, there we were, four long days, showing the demonstrations again and again. Fortunately, there were three of us, and other people as well, so we had some time to check out the other booths of the exhibition. In addition to us, Ericsson showed some demonstrations from Fidelity, and Liberty Alliance staff (Andrew Shikiar and Dervla O'Reilly) presented general introductions to the work being done in the Liberty Alliance. All in all, very nice event, and it was really nice to get this opportunity to show our work.

About the event itself, well, I must say that this has been the biggest exhibition (or tradeshow, how should you categorize this) so far. I have not been in Cebit, which might be a good competitor for this, but for instance to compare this to the IST-2006 in Helsinki, where I also was, I would say this is eight times bigger; whereas IST-2006 had one big exhibition hall, here we had eight of them, of the same size. So, a lot to see and experience, and a lot of little (useless?) things to gather. From the booths I collected a USB-hub enabled mouse pad, laser pen, a few "stress balls", and a bunch of different kind of LED gadgets, among others. There was also quite many "mobile chicks", which the male visitors could enjoy. That is, nice looking models with very minimal clothing, promoting some products or companies. My colleague, Paavo, concentrated more on this aspect of the event :-).

During the 3GSM congress, the Liberty Alliance also organized a mobile deployment workshop, in which I gave a presentation/demonstration, together with Antoine de Poorter from Ericsson, amout the results of the Fidelity project. The workshop was attended by about 15 persons, which created a nice and warm athmosphere to present and discuss the deployments of the Liberty Alliance.

In summary, the 3GSM prooved to be a very good venue for showing the work we have done in the area of identity management. We met many interesting people, of which a few were such that some real cooperation, maybe in the format of joint project, could be initiated. We also got opportunity to promote our work within our own company, in the form of an intranet story.