Fen Labalme

Fen Labalme has been continuously evolving his goal of privacy-enhanced personalization since creating the first personalized information system in 1979 (NewsPeek, at the then-nascent MIT Media Lab). As part of his research into personalized information, he coined the term broadcatch to describe a suite of "many-to-one" technologies designed to provide information the way people really want it: timely, trusted, and on target. Fen continued to push the personalization-with-privacy envelope as co-founder of Lumeria Inc., where he furthered his work in agent and infomediary technology. He is the primary author of the seminal Infomediary and Reputations white papers. Fen is currently the CTO and chief architect of several inter-related personal profiles with privacy initiatives, including:

• OpenPrivacy - an Open Source, cryptographically secure, distributed platform for creating, maintaining, and selectively sharing profile information (e.g., a marketplace for anonymous demographic profiles),
• Identity Commons - a technology-neutral trust federation that is continually seeking out emerging technologies to enhance its planned open global trust network, and
• 2idi - an identity services provider with a difference, whose mission is to provide its customers with total control over their identity-related transactions

Fen believes that current technologies such as XRI/XDI, SAML and public key cryptography, combined with greater power and bandwidth at the desktop, will at last enable his vision to become a reality.