08.22.05

Corporate information security

Posted in Technology Ventures at 8:10 pm by Ray Wu

More and more businesses start to worry about internal information leak, regardless whether it is from e-mail, web or even USB. Compare to the traditional firewall/intrusion detection solutions which are more of preventing wrongfully access from outside to inside, these kind of startups are protecting the reverse information flow which is generated more from inside to outside.

  • Vontu: corporate information flow monitoring and loss prevention
      • VCs: Benchmark Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock Associates
  • Tablus: Content Alarm identifies, audits, and prevents unauthorized or unintended disclosures of confidential information.
      • VCs: Menlo Ventures
  • Safend: USB security throughout all end points inside an enterprise
      • VCs: Walden Isreal
  • SealedMedia: Digital information protection and monitoring
      • VCs: Pond Ventures, Crescendo Ventures, 3i
  • Authentica: Enterprise rights management
      • VCs: greylock, northbridge
  • Limigent
  • Liquid Machine
  • Credant

08.15.05

Source Code Vulnerability Detection and Auditing

Posted in Technology Ventures at 8:08 pm by Ray Wu

Since 2ooo, I started to watch application firewall vendors evolve. Lately, the interesting trend seems to be on source code vulnerability where problems are no longer discovered, prevented, and eliminated at the run time, but at the root when the application is being developed.

Here are 3 of these interesting companies to watch:

  • Fortify: funded by KPCB
  • Secure Software: funded by Charles River Ventures, Updata Partners, Valhalla Partners
  • Ounce Lab: funded by greylock, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, BlueStream Ventures

08.10.05

Social networking needs a better solution…

Posted in Technology Ventures at 8:06 pm by Ray Wu

I have been watching social networking space for a while, from enterprise vendors like VisiblePath to consumer players like linkedin and friendster. There are several outstanding issues to the current solutions:

  • Privacy issue is a big concern for me. In all cases, I am required to expose my relationships on the open Internet for unknown people to search and discover. In addition, there is limited capability for me to segment and add entitlement on who can view/interact with my network. I wish their solution is a desktop solution rather than a hosting version and have more way to protect my network than what is available today.
  • There is just no relationship trust visibility. A lot of these systems seems to provide a magic formula based on the automatically tracking of number of e-mail exchanges to determine whether you are likely to reach that person. That is just BS. What if I just exchange argument and hate messages to each other? What makes the system so smart to know how I really feel about this person just by looking at a few variables? Unless there is a text scanner to provide sophisticated text and emotion analysis. But then, all privacy protection is lost.

I will probably explore more on this, there got to be a better solution to create a more secure and dynamic human relationship network. I think web is about open access, while human relationship is more about trust and entitlement. Unless there is a trust boundary and access protection, business social networking would continue to struggle.

08.03.05

Edge Technologies

Posted in Technology Ventures at 8:03 pm by Ray Wu

With the proliferation of P2P, wireless and RFID technology, there is a growing technology trend that moves from centralized model to distributed edge model. This is not surprising. Looking back in history, we have experienced evolution from central model (mainframe) to distributed technology (client/server) and then back to centralized model again with web server. With distributed SOA architecture, higher computing power on devices and ubiquitous connection, there seems to be a natural trend back leveraging distributed edge to enhance communication, lower computing cost and support better performance for transient network.

There are a few interesting companies emerging from this:

  • Skype: P2P VoIP
    ** VCs: DFJ, Index ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners
  • Mercora: P2P radio
    ** VCs: Norwest
  • Sociallight: mobile social network
  • Wavemarket: location based blogging and alerts
    ** VCs: DFJ, Nokia/Bluerun, Intel, Telecom Italia
  • Cognima: mobile services to upload pictures from cell phone to online service

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