Identity Companies: Paid to Know About You I was at the Montgomery & Co. investor conference in Los Angeles this week, where 186 promising start-ups present their businesses to over 1000 potential investors. The companies are private, so they don't give away too much financial information. Instead, you see what is doing well by watching where the money men spend their time. Three of the best-attended sessions were with companies that deal with online identity, which is actually about knowing about the person logging into a Web site, extracting information about them and then passing it on profitably. You can see why these sessions were packed. It matters now because corporations are struggling to keep straight all the fixed and mobile devices addressing their servers. In the cloud world, they increasingly have partner companies inside their computers too, and need to know who these people are. On the consumer side, companies want stronger online relations with clients, so they are offering them social features like games and status updates to Facebook. In every case what they really want is information. Identity management is all those things: how a corporate server can be sure only authorized people are accessing data, and how a Web site can recognize the right customers and remember their habits, to sell them more stuff. And sell us they will. Gigya is an identity management company aimed at consumers. It started out as a widget on MySpace, and got in early enough into social logins that it now works with over 500,000 Web sites, and enables over 1 billion logins a month. If you have logged on to a site through Facebook, Twitter, Google, China's RenRen social network or any of 21 other social services, you've probably been using Gigya. Gigya acts as an intermediary between social networks and the Web sites of Fox, Frito-Lay, Nike and Sony, among others. The companies could do it themselves, but it is simpler to outsource. When it verifies your identity via Facebook, say, Gigya also passes along to the commerce sites whatever social information you've recorded there and given permission to share, from your nickname and birthday to who your friends are. It doesn't share your activities on the commerce site back to Facebook unless you choose to publish something from there. "You get an incredibly rich amount of information about a user and his friends," said Patrick Salyer, Gigya's chief executive. We believe that within two years 99 percent of commercial Web sites will have a social log in. Consumers like social logins because it's easier than remembering all those passwords; on average, Mr. Salyer says, consumers have acquired 28 different login identities. By simplifying the process with a social login, however, they are also sharing their birthdays, e-mails, location, gender, favorite activities, and more. This affects the kind of content that is put in front of them, the types of games a Web site will have them play, or whether their on-site behavior is broadcast to Facebook or Twitter, or other sites. "Our clients are just starting to think about what they can do with that data," said Mr. Salyer, who last November started offering a database product to help manage this torrent of new information. We can show a product manager at Nike who is reviewing a shoe positively or negatively, who is writing things about it, where they go to school, or what their interests and hobbies are. You can see why that would be attractive. In case companies are anxious abut all this personal information they are using, the identity management company can also make sure the Web site is compliant with different snooping laws in, say, Europe, where laws are stricter. In corporate identity, both Symplified and Ping Identity are pitching identity management in corporate cloud computing. Another company, called Okta, is also doing this kind of password-based permissions and authentication. As cloud-based networks explode, there is a lot of money in keeping straight all those corporate passwords, figuring out whether a browser belongs to an authorized business partner, a trusted employee, or a new customer. Corporations can also amass a lot of information about people this way, including their work history, the projects they work on, who else they know in a company, and what kind of devices they use. Simplified claims it will increase revenues by 500 percent this year, and expects to have revenues near $100 million annually by 2015. Ping, which has been around since 2002, says it has grown at a 75 percent compounded annual growth rate over the past decade, and will also pass $100 million in annual sales within a couple of years. "Given enough time, all technologies go through a networking phase," said Andre Durand, Ping's chief executive. We are taking identity through a networking phase. And now that we are in this networked identity world, it's likely, companies probably will not leave.