Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Safely (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who else plays in that space? Whom do you compete with? And are the applications only phone locating applications, or are there other applications  you’re seeing emerge in that space?

Tasso Roumeliotis: There are other ones. To answer your first question, the biggest competitor, by far, is a company called TCS. They’re the ones that have the Verizon account, which is the single account in the United States that we don’t have. TCS is the competitor there. In terms of other services, location and beyond is where we’re providing personal security. In regards to location, in September 2011, the CEO of Sprint went up on stage and announced – and we launched – a product that uses location on smart phones, on Android phones primarily, that detects if you’re texting while driving. So, we can’t detect whether you’re in the passenger seat, but we do know that you’re traveling at more than 10 miles an hour. And if you are using the phone – calling, playing games, whatever it is – we have a lock-up screen that comes up. This technology’s being pre-loaded into every phone that Sprint’s launching. T-Mobile launched this product a few months before that.

What we’re seeing is that personal security with clever uses of location technology, like what we do with detecting velocity, [giving] people peace of mind. The area where we just launched a major product was account controls. Again, it’s about personal security for the family unit. You buy phones for your family, and you want to make sure that they’re not calling numbers they shouldn’t be calling or calling countries they shouldn’t be calling. You want to make sure that they’re not texting while driving, which we covered. But you also want to make sure that they’re not sending 1,000 text messages during school hours or making phone calls after midnight or downloading inappropriate games. There’s an entire product we just launched with Sprint called mobile controls that allows you to  manage the phones remotely and put in a discipline [system] so that the phone isn’t abused. These are other areas of what we call mobile personal safety and security that are areas where there’s a high willingness to pay. Both of these services are charged for monthly.

SM: Very interesting. Now, moving on to enterprise, what’s on your radar in terms of major movements in enterprise and what’s generating the revenues? What are the trends in that space?

TR: I think there are two key areas. One is around things like account controls. Clearly, enterprises – and this is not necessarily location based, although you can do a remote locate – want to make sure malicious applications or applications that could perhaps extract sensitive data aren’t being downloaded onto phones or the phones aren’t going to be misused. That’s one. The area where we see revenue being generated is alongside fleet tracking services. There’s a company called Xora, which is an interesting company that’s been around for a while and has a great solution that uses location to be able to track your fleet. You can do a variety of  things, like making sure that the fleet has checked into the job at the right time and confirm that it’s actually there. These are services have high ROI and are doing very well in the marketplace. By very well I mean that they’re making money, growing and solving a pain point, and still have market size to adapt.

SM: What is the lay of the land in local search? Of course, Google is a market leader. Yelp is doing very well. How does the revenue play out there? Obviously, penetration is high, but what is happening on the revenue side?

TR: I’m less of an expert on the local search side. I have  opinions on using location to bring people into your store, to do merchant-based geofencing. But the economics, whether it’s on Yelp, City Search – which has an open API that developers can include in their service applications to yield monetization that solely fits them, or Google – they are, in my understanding, quite similar to what you’re seeing on the Web. There are sponsored links and merchants that pay for placement. Yelp is about to go public, and we all know the local spectrum.

SM: We cover Yelp in depth on the blog, so we know the economics of Yelp very well.

TR: It’s the same, almost.

SM: What is the situation with mobile coupons? That is an industry that has tried its stride since – I don’t know – the late 1990s. Right?

TR: Yes. You’re right, maybe as long ago as then. Some of the time “coupons” is an analog term. Clearly, what Groupon sells you is a powerful reactive coupon. The coupon in the analog world that people understand is the grocery coupon, which is, in my understanding, the largest industry. There’s a company called Cellfire out there that is aggressively attacking that. My perspective is – again, we’ve done a lot of research and we have developers who are building on  technology we’ve built – for you to physically lure somebody into your store with a coupon, it has to be an aggressive. That means not 30 cents  off a box of Cheerios, but something more significant, à la Groupon like $50 off a $100 massage coupon. That’s our perspective on mobile. If it’s going to be mobile, it needs to be something that would perhaps, in real time, make me get out of my chair and go do something right now. The barrier to reaction would be higher.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Safely
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