Procom
The protection communication platform (Procom) is a collection of new age communications applications styled to appeal to the mobile community and uniquely suit the needs of a wide spectrum of end users.
Business Idea
History is rife with product launches resulting in consumers finding themselves attached to things they didn't know they needed. What often starts as apathy or curiosity in end users quickly turns to joy and desire when finding that their communication needs are met in a particularly useful and intuitive way. Procom will keep the consumer's interest front and foremost when filling the market gap of a of secure, standards compliant, portable, and self hosted communications platform. Its first round of consumer facing applications, Profone and Protext, when released will work, look, and feel like an existing product to improve the user experience.
Unique Selling Proposition
Procom helps relieve business and private users alike in different ways. Industry currently has poor choices for self hosting their communication while leisure users texting are forced into a user-unfriendly walled garden approach popularized by industry standing to lose market share.
Our supporting technology differentiates Procom by solving four problems at once:
Lack of standardized interfaces
Poor cross platform portability
Afterthought of data protection (rather than designed in)
Lack of support for self hosting
A challenge we face is making the unique nature of our offering apparent and appealing to end users who will serve to grow the market for Procom organically. This takes us back to the principle we've found that “consumers find themselves attached to things they didn't know they needed before” which has happened throughout Internet history with launches like Google Search, iPhone, and Skype.
Project Founder
Michael Schloh von Bennewitz is the inventor of Procom while colleagues in well known positions have been informed of the project and may choose to join the founding team at an early stage.
He has a long list of experienced and high ranking contacts in both industry and open source community. Industrial partners interested in the project include Intel and Orange while Procom could interest smaller players like Truphone, Silent Circle, or Tizen (Samsung/Intel.) Good relations with the open source community secures quick access to qualified staff and low cost engineering resources.
Project State
The project has completed conception and finds itself in the design stage. Once funding is secured and staff increase, an agile engineering method will result in less waterfall-like stage development.
Revenue Model
While the unique collection of supporting technology serves to differentiate the product, tried and true income models consisting of premium service (Asterisk/Skype), OEM value added (Android/Opera), dual license (MySQL/Qt), and consultation (Asterisk/ownCloud) provide ongoing revenue while cultivating a large community of users enjoying Procom free of cost.
Market Volume
Market value is estimated to grow linearly in the case of low adoption and exponentially otherwise. Considering that all leading mobile platforms (Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry) integrate browsers and calendars but none integrate secure and portable IP voice and text apps, we think there is room to expand the market and a good chance to be the first to market. A successful outcome of such a venture could resemble CyanogenMod's recently closed $23 million funding round as CyanogenMod was likewise a decentralized open source project that grew organically.
Relevant Competitors (from large to small)
WhatsApp
Trillian
Skype
Viber
Whisper Systems
Silent Circle
BitTorrent
Heml.is
Wickr
Cryptocat
Scramble
Mailpile
While Procom is a broad enough technology to render most comparison useless, the closest challengers could be considered to be Skype and WhatsApp. We belive taking even a portion of market share from such competitors would result in a thriving business.
Additionally, some so called competitors would likely agree to partnerships of various natures. Others produce open source software which could be integrated in Procom pending license review. We have maintained good relations with a number of players in this industrial arena.
Why Now
There is a good deal of excitement relating to new age communications platforms providing defence from personal and corporate loss. A number of high profile data theft cases have had a enormous impact on industrial growth of communications providers and associated Procom-like products, however these products have not met the challenging goals that our platform sets to meet (see first paragraph.) Industry finds itself in a unique time, a sweet spot of production, market gap, and informed demand has been reached.
Resources
For more information on product launches or the company, please contact the inventor:
Michael Schloh von Bennewitz
Computer Scientist and Software Engineer
Europalab Networks, Munich and S.F. Bay Area
Telephone: +49(89)44239885
Fax: +49(89)44239886
Web: michael.schloh.com
Email: michael@schloh.com
For more information about the Procom project itself, please visit the project homepage:
http://procom.europalab.com/