What is Equals?

Equals is an exciting new company that’s about to come out of stealth-mode. We’re revolutionizing the world of communications with a life changing technology that enables Social Communications as never before, allowing both parties in a communication to assert a channel and service of their choice, on their terms.

Equals gives people the power to enhance relationships by offering control of their image and communications in the fast, always-on modern age. Depending on who is calling (relationship with the caller) and what a user is doing (temporal context), the communication gets routed to the preferred channel / device.

Equals product strategy is guided by its vision to convert users into first class citizens of the network world, where users own their identifiers, data and relationships; this coupled with the need to integrate with all consumer digital identity touch-points.

Product Strategy

Equals enables you, as first class citizens of the network world, to assert a subset of things you own - identifiers and data as appropriate based on your temporal context (an example of distributed and decentralized set of data and attributes) and your relationship with the other end-point (s) in a transaction. It includes your likes, dislikes, location, presence, calendar, state, availability; -- All these attributes could be distributed amongst multiple authorities such as your calendar is with Outlook, and let's say your location is known to your network operator and your relationships are defined within Facebook.

Equals does not own your identity, but instead gives you tools to control how you assert yourself, how you share your identity, and how you communicate with your friends and others. Equals is about making communications and identity sharing simple, safe, and fair - thus enabling a key part of user-centric identity. Equals plays a key role in the universe of user centric applications in the Internet by implementing various open identity protocols which give you more control over your digital identities.

Equals vision is to integrate with all possible touch points (social networks, mobile, VoIP clients) for a user in digital communications domain. It is in this regard that Equals plays a role as both an identity provider (OpenID provider) and a Relying Party.

Equals will also implement secure API authentication that allows it to access third party service providers, such as Twitter, and act on your behalf, securely but without having to ask for your credentials. This means that Equals can be your one-stop portal for managing key attributes of your identity like presence and communication identifiers such as email and IM channels. And of course Equals will allow other applications to access Equals through secure API authentication; making Equals truly a key infrastructure piece that integrates seamlessly into your network of social applications.

Finally, Equals will adopt emerging open social network standards such as FOAF, XFN, and microformats to allow you as a user, to truly own and manage your own data.