[15th June 2006 edit - TenCube’s Boomerang is now known as WaveSecure… get more information at their website]
The last group to present - TenCube. Among all the presentations, TenCube’s product strikes me as the one with the biggest potential, as it addresses a great need out in the market right now of securing your data on your mobile phone just in case you lose it (especially in wake of the NYP scandal that’s happening right now).

In a nutshell, Boomerang (tencube’s product) allows, with a small downloadable package, someone to remotely lock the phone if they happen to lose it. Once locked, the phone is rendered unusable and, in fact, can be tracked via location via Location-Based Server technology. This is definitely pretty exciting stuff, especially since I tend to lose phones all the time due to my absent mindedness! (I’ve lost 2 last year alone.)

Darius Cheung, the CEO of the startup, started off with a presentation of the company and a short demo of Boomerang. Halfway through the presentation, for some strange reason I started to become Darius’ laptop monkey - clicking away at his powerpoint for him! Actually it was because Varun (the CTO) was busy showing demo on the floor I think - I was glad to be helping out! Shows you how informal the whole thing was really.

There were still a few drawbacks in the product I felt - the fact that it’s only available on the smartphone platforms (Symbian and Microsoft), and that the location-based service for tracking down your phone would be carrier dependent (unfortunately I can’t think of a way around that), and also the fact that it requires a download (users are notoriously lazy - I should know - I’m one!). Aside from that, it looks like tencube is definitely off to a great start as a product.

On top of that, tencube are going to be charging for the service, but the price would be cheaper than the Caller ID service that all mobile phone subscribers are paying for right now apparently. The locking and privacy service isn’t carrier dependent as well, and with that I could see this product scaling on a worldwide basis… so personally I am pretty bullish about tencube as long as their execution strategy is right.

Darius Cheong from Tencube

Powerpoint from Tencube

…another slide from Tencube

…and another…

Posted by pallid on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 1:21 am.