Recorded during an earlier interview.
I was lucky enough to interview KoolSpan at the RSA Conference. Elad Yoran, Executive Chairman, joins Lisacast to discuss TrustChip technology and recent financing of $7.1 million (What? I thought there was a recession!.) KoolSpan’s crypto engine is a self-contained authentication, encryption and key management platform. That’s right, I said ‘crypto engine’. Tune in to learn more.
BlogTalkRadio
Lisa Padilla: Hi, and welcome to the show today. This afternoon, we are broadcasting, we have this BlogTalkRadio at the RSA Conference in San Francisco where Elad Yoran who is from KoolSpan is going to talk to us a little bit about their technology and the crypto engine and a recent about financing that the company received that was announced this week I believe. And Elad, are you with me?
Elad Yoran: I am with you Lisa and delighted to be here.
Lisa Padilla: Thank you. I am sorry to cut you off as our show started. But we were talking a little bit just a few minutes ago about the significance of receiving some funding in this day and age when the economy is purposively a bit shaky or we are supposed to be concerned. I think we still see a lot of activity around technologies that really shows some values. So, maybe you can talk a little bit, Mr. Yoran, about your background and your post as a chairman of KoolSpan and about your recent funding.
(Informal talk)
Elad Yoran: First, there was an article on the front page of the business section in today’s new York Times that talks about Silicon Valley funding being impacted by the economy. And so, I think that getting funding today well may be a little bit impacted by the economies for companies with strong prospect. Funding is still available. And for us, in a personal sense, getting the funding was critically important and that it enabled the company to go forward and do the things that it needed to do in order to meet the demand for its product for the TrustChip. So, we raised $7.1 million. It’s a significant amount of money and the lion’s share of the funding will go towards things like demand fulfillment as well as of course to continued research and development.
Lisa Padilla: And so, if you get one step back anyway in this sort of way the groundwork for products, when it started and how it started.
Elad Yoran: Well, KoolSpan was founded five years ago by a gentleman by the name of Tony Fascenda. He is actually the company’s CEO and media visionary in the world of wireless and mobility. He has been an entrepreneur for the last 35 years and has developed paging systems and two-way paging systems and handheld forms long before our it became really a consumer market or a market in which every person really had a wireless handheld device like a cell phone. So he has been doing this for years. And sometimes I joke around with Tony and tell him that it took somebody with his background and his perspective on mobility and wireless to come up with a solution as innovative for the security industry. So it is really an out-of-the-box and creative thinker here.
Lisa Padilla: And give us one example of how like TrustChip would be implemented, what’s your case study about that.
Elad Yoran: So, if we think about what cell phones are today, they have evolved a long way. Cell phones aren’t just for making telephone calls, I mean they are really little computers. And we use them for today a wide variety of applications, obviously still to make telephone calls but also for e-mail and for all of the PDA functionality. And now, we see all kinds of other applications rolling out into the cell phones. Now, the thing to keep in mind is that cell phones were designed to be mobile, they were designed to easy to use, they were designed to be a lot of things, just not secure. And now that, we are using cell phones to do so many things, of course one of the most important of which is still making a telephone call that security has to be elevated and brought into the equation. So it’s not just about mobility and ease of use, all those things are still critical, but another critical dimension or characteristic that we have to add to that list is security. And so, you have to question what’s an application, I will give you a very simple one that we all do every day and that’s making a telephone call. When we make telephone calls on landline phones, we have very strong sense that the conversations we have are secure and we know who we are talking to on the other end and we know to a great extent that the conversations are not being eavesdropped. [Full article]
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