This afternoon, OpenID Foundation Japan held a press conference with its 32 member companies. It is the first time that the member companies are announced to the public. It was also announced that OpenID Foundation Japan is now accepting the members from wider community.

Also, it has announced the partnership with Liberty Alliance Japan SIG to further the harmnonization effort.

The member companies announced were:

Asahi Net (ISP)
Automation Research Associates (IT)
Cerego Japan (Education)
CyberTrust (CA)
Excite Japan (ISP/Portal)
Infoteria Corp.C (IT)
Japan Airlines International (Transportation)
Japan IBM (IT)
Japan Verisign (CA)
JCB (Credit Card)
K Opticom (ISP)
KDDI (telco)
Lin Network (IT/Consulting)
Livedoor (Portal/Web 2.0)
Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Co. Ltd.(Insurance)
mixi Inc. (SNS)
NEC (Manufacturing)
NEC Biglobe (ISP/Portal)
Nifty (ISP/Portal)
Nomura Research Insititute (IT/Consulting)
Oki (Manufacturing)
Rakuten (Internet Commerce/Financial)
SBI Holdings (Financial group)
Senshukai Co. Ltd.(Internet Commerce)
Seven Bank (Banking)
SixApart (Web 2.0)
Softbank BB (telco/ISP)
Sonpo Japan Systems Solution (Insurance Systems)
Taihei Computer (Financial Systems)
Technorati Japan (Web 2.0)
Yahoo! Japan (Portal)
Zakura (Web 2.0)

It is quite notable in the sense that now financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies are now on board.

In the presentation, it was announced that it is going to do the following:

[Techinical]
- Technical Seminar Series “OpenID Tech Night”
- Create Implementation Guidelines
- Discuss potential extensions
- Translation of the documents
- Tech Competition and public experimentation
- Special Interest Groups (e.g., User Interface,
assurance, payment)

[Business]
- Creation of case studies and seminars
- Taking statistics
- Business Idea Competition
- Research on the legal aspects
- Business Seminar “OpenID BizDay”

[Public Relation]
- Seminars for pres people
- Seminar with extrernal organizations
- Web site
- Helping out to promote the OpenID services
of the members.

The press conference was well attended with 45 press people including one TV (TV Tokyo).

In conjunction with it, Excite Japan has announced the availability of OpenID to its users. Also, Rakuten Kantan Kessai (Easy Payment) was publicly introduced as OpenID based service. It probably is the second instance of OpenID based service involving payment.

For more details, contact : contact@openid.or.jp

Accroding to the survay by internet.com and marsh research which was conducted over 300 internet user (50% male, 50% female, 20% each of 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s), 263 of them were using sites that requires authentication. Among them, 28% of them knew about OpenID, and 15% were using OpenID.

Since the number of sample is pretty small, and the distribution is not equal to the demographic pattern, there apparently is much more error than some other survay. Even then, it is an encouraging number.

Remember: a similar survay back in February where only 12% knew about OpenID and only 1.2% of them were using it. Awareness is 250% and usage is 12 fold!

We are close to the take off, I guess.

I wonder if there are similar statistics for U.S. and E.U…

If you know the figure, please let me know!

So, the last week was such a big week for OpenID in Japan.

Here are the list:

Oct. 2: Sourceforge.jp started to offer OpenID based login. It also supports i-names (XRI)!

Oct. 3: JAL expanded OpenID data sharing partnership to another Hotel reservation agent. (Note: this is using TX proposal, and typically transacting something between US$100 to $300.)

Oct. 6: NEC Biglobe started offering BIGLOBE OpenID, which is entirely based on TLS and EV-Certs.

Oct. 6: Rakuten, the biggest internet commerce site in Japan, started to offer “Rakuten Payment” based on OpenID. (I hear that Rakuten’s average sales per transaction is around US$80. I may be wrong…)

There are other backlogs with “Transacting OpenID” that I know but I cannot speak right now.

Japan is going towards the “transacting OpenID”.

I wonder if it is happening else where.