StartUp Beat

SUB: What is your primary value proposition for users?

Vineet Jain: Egnyte provides an on-demand file server for small businesses to store all corporate data, share within and outside the company and allow backup of personal computers.  It eliminates all hardware, point solutions like tape based backup, ftp, vpn, etc., and all management overhead with the server in the cloud.  Best of all, you get this on-demand file server with unlimited storage at 1/8th the cost compared to doing it yourself.

I strongly believe that the key to fast adoption is to keep the learning curve as low as possible.  This was done by leveraging the best known paradigms–My Computer on Windows or Finder on Mac.  Egnyte allows the users to access the file server natively from their desktop, in addition from any web browser.  We are learning from experience that if the user does not get the product in 5-to-7 minutes, the chances of them continuing to use it go down dramatically.  Therefore, we have made an intense effort to provide a simple, yet not simplistic, product.

SUB: When was the company founded, and how did the idea come about?

Vineet Jain: Previous to Egnyte, I founded a startup called Valdero, funded by KPCB, Trinity and MDV.  After having cut my teeth on how to successfully build a company, I and three others, were looking at what do next after a successful exit in September, 2005.  The SMB market was quite appealing since the opportunity is large.

We focused on the three trends–a.) commoditization of storage; b.) easy availability of broadband; and c.) teams getting more distributed or remote.  All these three coupled with the gradual acceptance of hosted solutions, got us convinced that this was an idea to pursue.  The idea to provide “Infrastructure On Demand” was born as a result.  The Egnyte On Demand File Server is the base foundation of the macro idea.

We self-funded Egnyte for almost two years and only recently, decided to raise our first round that we closed a couple of months back.

SUB: Who do you see as your competition?

Vineet Jain: On the surface, this market appears quite crowded.  One end of the spectrum you have a lot of consumer oriented solutions.  Frankly, some of them are features on Egnyte.  On the other end of the spectrum are enterprise class solutions like Sharepoint from Microsoft, that are trying to morph down for the smaller businesses.

There are very few SMB-focused solutions from ground up.  Keep in mind that even though SMBs cannot spend the same amount as money as the large companies and also does not have the same level of IT competency, their needs in terms of security and privacy are not any different from large enterprises.  This is more true for information centric businesses.  From day one, Egnyte has focused on the SMB market paying via the subscription model.

SUB: Can you describe the underlying technology behind your product, and how it works for users?

Vineet Jain: You sign up for your file server via www.egnyte.com.  When you sign up, we provide a company-specific web address, e.g. mycompany.egnyte.com, with which you will always access your file server.  Within minutes, we provision this for you and your can start setting up users and folders.  You can optionally, download and install a small Egnyte client that maps the file server as a drive on your computer—XP, Vista, Mac and Linux—and also allows you to back up personal email and file folders.  This client, written primarily in python, is platform agnostic.

The back-end application layer is on Linux with our own RAID6 storage.  They key technologies are in providing LAN like speeds over the public Internet using a variety of caching and compression techniques, design for security in all layers—physical/network/application and to scale globally, ability to add servers at an incremental cost.

Egnyte – www.egnyte.com

Posted by startupbeat at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Web Site: www.vidoop.com

Headquarters: Portland, Oregon

Year Founded: 2006

Founders: Joel Norvell, CEO, and Luke Sontag, President, Technology

Investors:

Employees: About 30 

By Joel Norvell

How many passwords do you currently have to remember?  How often have you tried to log onto an important Web site, such as your bank or retirement account, and struggled to remember which username and password you registered with?  On the flip side, do you worry that your financial information is unsafe, because you use the same username and password at every location?

Vidoop got its start in 2006 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I met co-founder Luke Sontag.  Luke had gotten a glimpse of the security problems that plague large financial institutions when he worked as a security analyst at a bank.  We knew that that there had to be an easier way to handle secure logins.

We founded Vidoop to provide a solution to the problem of remembering complex passwords that provided a great user experience while still maintaining the strong login security required by our most sensitive online accounts.  At the same time, we discovered there was also the opportunity to turn logins into a revenue generator for financial institutions.

Protecting users’ identities has become a hot topic lately.  The increase in hacking, from keylogging malware to phishing attacks, has made it vital that online financial accounts be able to protect their consumers.  At the same time, our research shows that 69 percent of Web users who connect to financial institutions online have at least four or more passwords.

Enter Vidoop’s ImageShield.  Instead of making consumers remember a static password, Vidoop uses the human mind’s superior ability to recall pictures.  Sites protected with Vidoop present their users with an ever-changing grid of photographs in different categories—cars, boats, cats, flowers, etc.  Each image is tied to a one-time sequence of letters, which the user types in like any other password.  Only the user will know the correct categories, since automated hacking attacks are not able to interpret images, and the actual letters entered onto the site change with each login.

To provide even more security, Vidoop offers a range of multi-factor authentication options.  In addition to the ImageShield, financial institutions can elect to have one-time passwords sent to a user’s cell phone or to have a confirmation by voice phone.  With these methods, Vidoop makes sites easier to use and harder to breach.

Furthermore, the cost of deploying stronger authentication has been prohibitive, but Vidoop can lower cost and potentially eliminate it from the equation.

While Vidoop’s authentication solution is licensed per a financial institution’s user base, Vidoop can change authentication from being an overhead cost to a revenue generator by selling the images in the grid to advertisers for product placement.  So, instead of seeing a generic flower in the image-grid, consumers might see a bouquet from Flowers.com.

It sounds simple, but it has great potential.  For financial institutions willing to share ad revenue, we can provide Vidoop’s strong authentication for free in exchange for sharing revenue from the ad sales.  For financial institution sites that choose this option, the advertising version of this model works like this: Vidoop provides the image grid application.  The financial institution simply integrates this application with their existing authentication infrastructure.  Vidoop supplies the image and advertising content, and they share viewing-related data, such as how often each image was shown or clicked on.

It’s pretty simple, the financial institution keeps its users, and Vidoop provides usable security, stronger authentication, and a better user experience.  And with sponsored images the everyday login suddenly becomes a revenue generator and marketing asset.

So where are we today?

Physically, we moved the company to Portland, Oregon, in September to take advantage of a stronger economic environment and talent pool for our company.  Our headquarters are now closer to our customers, partners and West coast engineering talent, which will further drive the development of our products and solutions.

As a company, Vidoop has rolled out its platform for financial institutions, and we have also launched a free password manager—myVidoop.com—that is available to anyone on the Web.  Like any start-up, we welcome interest from investors, but we are also aggressively marketing our strong authentication to financial institutions and other higher transaction businesses.

Multi-factor authentication shouldn’t come in the form of expensive key fobs, tokens, or USB drives.  It should be simple and secure as image recognition, and it should be easy, fun and an opportunity to generate revenue.  Vidoop’s authentication solutions finally allow profitable, usable, secure access.

That is a solution everyone can embrace.

Vidoop - www.vidoop.com

Posted by startupbeat at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)