Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you deploy in a Fortune 500, is the assumption that the phones or tables the Fortune 500 employees are using are owned by the corporation and they custom-build your chips and other applications on top of that into these devices?

Gregg Smith: It can work in a couple of different ways. Yes, they can absolutely leverage the chip and our applications and build applications on top of that. For example, Samsung has done that with us. In other cases, we might just provide the chip and the application. One of our partners would provide the chip and the application and they would just use standard off-the-shelf apps that we sell every day.

Sramana Mitra: This then brings us to a couple of different questions. What is the competitive landscape around your business? Who are your direct competitors? Who are your indirect competitors?

Gregg Smith: We have a number of competitors who provide secure voice or secure text messaging such as Cellcrypt on the voice side and TigerText on the text messaging side. We have a competitor called Silence Circle that was doing both secure voice and text but they have now decided to build a phone and provide the applications right in it. We have also partnered with companies like Samsung. We prefer to play with that elephant rather than go out and build a device. Those are a couple of the competitors that are out there today.

Sramana Mitra: When you are working with an organization that is standardized on a Samsung device, you work with Samsung and Samsung basically builds your chip into the device?

Gregg Smith: We provide the chip and the chip slides into the device.

Sramana Mitra: How does this play with the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend that is all over corporate America right now?

Gregg Smith: It works perfectly. For example, Koolspan had BYOD policy and we had five applications that were very important to our business. We wanted people to talk and text message securely so they can bring their own device in and have the chip installed. We can secure the enterprise applications with the chip. We have the voice application. We have the text messaging and file sharing applications. Basically, we’re utilizing the chips for consistent cryptography across the applications. Your Gmail, photos, and text messaging can be segmented right there. It’s a very simple process.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your industry that is worth discussing in terms of trends and developments? What are you anticipating?

Gregg Smith: There is this one thing I meant to discuss when you talked about trends. I’m glad you asked me that again. If you were to think about the smartphone market today, only about 3% of smartphones have security on them. That’s something that we pay very close attention to because it shows me, an entrepreneur, that there is a very large market opportunity.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith
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