SlickLogin has been acquired by Google, just five months after launching at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Word of the acquisition is confirmed by a notice on the company’s site, where they say that they’ll be joining Google in their efforts to “make the Internet safer for everyone”. We’ve also confirmed this news with Google.
Exact details of the deal are still under wraps — but, as always, we’re digging for more.
The idea behind SlickLogin was, at the very least, quite novel: to verify a user’s identity and log them in, a website would play a uniquely generated, nearly-silent sound through your computer’s speakers. An app running on your phone would pick up the sound, analyze it, and send the signal back to the site confirming that you are who you say you are — or, at least, someone who has that person’s phone.
Or, to get slightly more technical… here’s how I put it back when the company first launched:
Here’s the idea: as a user, you’d go to whatever SlickLogin-enabled site you’d like to log in to. Tap the login button, hold your phone up close to the laptop, and you’re in.
SlickLogin can use a bunch of protocols to start verifying your phone’s position: WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, visual markers like QR codes, and of course, GPS. Their self-dubbed “secret sauce”, though, is their use of uniquely generated sounds intentionally made inaudible to the human ear. Your computer plays the sound through its speakers, while an app on your smartphone uses the device’s built-in microphone to pick up the audio.
The service was built to be used either as a password replacement, or as a secondary, Two-Factor authentication layer on top of a traditional password.
Story developing..
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