Technology
Document distribution service incubating here
Atlanta Business Chronicle - by Mary Jane Credeur
Imagine leaving the latest draft of an earnings report on the copier machine just before driving across town for a once-in-a-lifetime meeting with potential investors.
Now imagine pushing a few buttons on your mobile phone and watching the pages of that report flutter out of the fax machine in the conference room just seconds before the meeting starts.
The founders of Singlecast Technologies Inc. have created a service that allows users to send or distribute documents from any device that can connect to the Internet.
The fledgling start-up company recently moved to Atlanta from New York and has its headquarters in the BrainWorks Ventures (OTC: BRAV) building on Marietta Street, where it is being incubated.
Andrew Joiner, president and co-founder of Singlecast, came up with the inspiration for the company last year when he was working as an investment banker for Salomon Smith Barney's New York office.
"It seemed like we were always printing out paper, then faxing it or sending it [by mail] overnight and I wasted so much time shuffling papers," said Joiner, who was raised in Atlanta and attended Lakeside High School. "I knew there had to be a better way to manage your documents and have the option of doing it from a mobile phone."
The "secret sauce" behind Singlecast, Joiner said, is a program that can remotely and securely access a desktop over the Internet, then forward the encrypted document -- no matter how large or small -- to a server that will distribute the file by e-mail, fax or overnight mail to recipients. A San Francisco start-up called vVault Inc. offers a similar service.
When Singlecast formally launches in October, users will pay a fixed price per month for a set number of transactions. To date, Singlecast has taken in less than $500,000 in start-up money from founders, friends and family.
Lancope names president. The former director of sales for iPlanet has been named president of fledgling Internet security software/hardware maker Lancope Inc..
Mike Van Bruinisse previously was the vice president of sales and business development for Lancope.
Van Bruinisse says he hopes to earn Lancope a name on the national security marketplace by promoting the company's flagship product, StealthWatch, which prevents unauthorized hits on a computer system by tracking regular network traffic.
"I think people realize that solutions out there today only solve part of the problem," Van Bruinisse said, referring to the "signature-based" approach of many anti-hacking software programs. "The bigger problem is not the attacks we see, but the attacks we don't know about."
Norcross-based Lancope, which is the sixth start-up company by entrepreneur Jay Chaudhry, formally launched in early 2001. Chaudhry and Georgia Tech computer networks professor John Copeland co-founded Lancope in September 2000.
Olympic contract. A Norcross software-maker has been awarded a half million dollar contract by the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee to provide employee scheduling software for the 25,000 workers and volunteers needed to keep the Olympics running smoothly.
The Olympics committee first approached Global Management Technologies Corp. about a year ago to determine whether its software could handle such a large volume of shifts and the complexities of work force management, such as split shifts, different pay rates and part- or full-time employment constraints.
The company was formed in 1995 with bootstrapping by its founders and has grown to a $10 million-a-year business, said Roger Avats, CEO and co-founder. Customers include major theme parks, call centers and banks. The company's largest competitor is Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Blue Pumpkin Software.
EarthLink sues. EarthLink Inc. (Nasdaq: ELNK) filed two lawsuits on Aug. 7 against two men who allegedly stole credit card numbers, e-mail account passwords and other personal information from EarthLink customers and racked up some $2 million in debt over the Internet.
A man from Tennessee is believed to have created a bogus "free credit report" Web site which asked for a user's credit-card numbers. Another man who lives in rural Michigan allegedly posed as an EarthLink employee and told users that their accounts would be terminated if they didn't respond immediately by verifying credit-card numbers, account names and passwords.
"We don't want anyone to think that EarthLink is tolerant of spam," said Paul F. "Pete" Wellborn III, an outside attorney who handles EarthLink's technology litigation. "The true motivation [behind the suits] is getting these people off the Internet."
EarthLink files about a dozen similar lawsuits each year and is expected to file three or four more before the end of August.
"These things come in flurries and now just seems to be a busy time," Wellborn said.
If you have news for Technology, contact Mary Jane Credeur at (404) 249-1055; fax, (404) 249-1058; or e-mail (mjcredeur@bizjournals.com).
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