A consortium of companies -- including Microsoft, Novell, Equifax, Oracle, and PayPal -- launched a nonprofit organization with the aim of creating new standards for identifying online users. The name chosen for this new group is the Information Card Foundation (ICF).

The goal of the ICF is to create a standardized framework that can be used to develop "Internet-based information cards and virtual founders," according to the website Dark Reading. The idea is to move away from usernames and passwords acting as your access method to websites, and instead, relying on a sort of single Internet-ID card that can be securely verified.

The primary reason companies are doing this is probably to cut down on costs associated with fraud, and people abusing their services with multiple accounts.

“The Internet was never really designed for dealing with people proving who they were. As a result, we have been left with a world of too many user names and passwords,” Charles Andres, executive director for the new ICF, was quoted as saying. "Criminals can exploit the weaknesses in here... We’ve got to do something to make this better.”

The foundation is looking to work with existing online-ID initiatives, such as those from the OpenID, Liberty Alliance, and Project Concordia groups.

It seems that the difficulty with getting this endeavor going isn't the technology behind it -- instead, the problem is setting up a standard the everyone can agree on. After that, the next challenging step  would be encouraging buisneses to get on board with the program.

One possible problem with this security initiative is, well, security. For current systems, if you lose a password and username for one site, you only lose access to the one service (if you maintain different ID's for every different website.) However, if a future, potential "virtual wallet" was apprehended by criminal elements, it seems like they would be able to quickly abuse your identification quickly and easily, to take advantage of multiple online services. By the very nature of the virtual wallet -- being on a computer connected to the Internet -- there is no system that could possibly be developed that would be completely, and certainly, secure.