And congratulations Kim. The news just become official that Microsoft has acquired Stefan Brand’s Credentica and all its intellectual property. This pairs up Stefan with Kim Cameron and Microsoft’s Identity and Access team to bring Credentica’s groundbreaking U-Prove zero-knowledge-proof technology to market.

This is a very exciting development, particularly because it means that between Microsoft’s work on CardSpace and Higgins work on new forms of i-cards, some real breakthrough functionality is coming to the i-card paradigm. It won’t happen overnight, just as it’s taken Stefan 15 years of work to bring U-Prove this far. But once you’ve pushed a boulder that big up a hill that long, a landslide can start much more easily.

(Not that those of us working on XRI and XDI would know anything about that picture. 😉 )