Oh look it's another Identity and Access Management for The Real World company trying to turn your phone into the Thing That Unlocks. Interestingly enough there

Oh look it's another Identity and Access Management for The Real World company trying to turn your phone into the Thing That Unlocks. Interestingly enough there's actually not a lot of companies out there trying to be this ambitious about using your phone to unlock things- sure there's Lockitron and Knock[1] but those are individual apps, not one huge holistic app that will replace username/password combos for online and software plus replace anything else that requires you to verify your identity in some way (credit card transactions, Gov ID, School ID, keycard for work, etc etc). As of a year ago when I was working for a company trying to make pretty much this exact product, the prevailing wisdom was you'd secure it with biometrics (for those of you wondering how you'd secure it if your bookie beat you up and stole your iWatch). Why it won't work, and why it didn't work for the company I worked for (and why I got laid off), and why it will probably never ever work in the way that everyone envisions is that getting all these disparate entities to agree to utilize this one app for access management just WILL. NOT. HAPPEN. As a company trying to build an app like this, you have to negotiate with every entity separately- so you have to negotiate with every state separately if you want to display state IDs on a mobile phone and have that be an accepted display method (didn't work- they wouldn't even talk to us). You have to negotiate with every separate credit card issuer who are all working on their own "Use your mobile as a credit card" idea. You have to negotiate with every separate access management company (Assa Abloy, etc etc) who are all ALSO working on their own mobile app to replace keycards... and on and on and on. Plus then on top of all that there's Apple, who wants the mobile phone to be the ubiquitous access device more than any other company out there, and who actually has the time and the money and the chops and the influence to make it happen, if anyone can make it happen. It's an impossible goal right out of the gate, and if you scale down the operation at all (focusing on logical access instead of logical + physical, for example) there's already an app that does it and does it better and has been doing it for longer. AND THEN you get to the consumer side of things where instead of simply typing in a username and password to get into a website (the standard way) or whacking your iPhone a preset number of times (as with Knock) you have to pull out your phone, unlock your phone, go to the app, scan the QR code or whatever, and then hope that the servers haven't crapped themselves for the tenth time today and will let you log into your damned computer already. No, I'm not pessimistic, why do you ask? [1]https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/knock-unlock-your-mac-without/id692929970?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/knock-unlock-your-mac-withou...