FounderBuzz

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Scott: Hi, I'm Scott Olson with FounderBuzz, and I'm here today with Mike Shultz, CEO of Infoglide, and here to tell us a little bit about the new product they're announcing MinorMonitor. So thanks for being with us today.

Mike: Thanks, Scott. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.

Scott: Great. Mike, one of the things I always like to start off is why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and about Infoglide and MinorMonitor.

Mike: Sure, happy to. I'm a leathered, weathered old entrepreneur guy. This is my fifth time to be a CEO. I've done any number of startups that were in the semiconductor industry and the software industry and the computer retailing industry. I've been at Infoglide now since 2001. I'm delighted to be here.

Scott: What about Infoglide and MinorMonitor, so for the people that aren't familiar with you guys, why don't you tell us.

Mike: Sure. Infoglide software is in the business of understanding identities and relationships. The obvious application of that technology is security, but it's really valuable in lots of thing. If you think about there are applications today, where hospitals are trying to de-duplicate their lists of patients. If you think about Scott Olson spelled O-L-S-O-N and O-L-S-E-N and Scot with one T and with two Ts, what they want to do is decrease all of that into one person, if it truly is one person. But to be very careful that they don't put two people into the same envelope, if you will.

Well, that's understanding identities and that's understanding words and differences, and words and how they relate and relationships and non-obvious relationships in those. Our technology is applicable to things like that.

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: Its highest and best use is security applications. Things like terrorist screening, we're the leading provider of terrorist screening software in the world. Bar none, nobody is as big as we are. I make a statement and it's true that the government uses our software more times every day to search for terrorists and terrorist watch lists, than every other application combined. That's a true statement, about five million times a day. So, the highest and best use of what we do is things like security. But here we have this Facebook issue. We have this issue with parents who no matter how hard they try are about three steps behind their kids.

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: Even at the age of 13, their kids are out in front of them.

Scott: Well, I mean I've got kids in elementary school, and my kids are pressuring me to get a Facebook account, because many of their friends have it. I haven't let them yet, because of security concerns.

Mike: Well, it turns out there are about 20 million kids under the age of 18 on Facebook. About 7.5 million of them, so say Consumer Reports, are under the age of 13 which is the minimum age to be on Facebook. About a third of all of the kids who are on Facebook don't qualify as being old enough to be on Facebook. The pressure you're getting from your kids is fairly uniform. That's everywhere.

Scott: I didn't even notice there was a requirement to be 13.

Mike: You have to be 13 years old. Facebook suggests that they kick 20,000 kids off of Facebook a day because they're too young to be on.

Scott: Interesting.

Mike: Isn't that interesting?

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: So here we . . .

Scott: So, if 13 is the minimum, what do you think is recommended?

Mike: Well, I'd have to say 13, wouldn't I?

Scott: Okay.

Mike: Having said that, I have a granddaughter who's 11 and she's on Facebook, but my son uses MinorMonitor. So I'm a great deal more comfortable about what she does.

Scott: So tell us about MinorMonitor.

Mike: Sure.

Scott: This is really there to help parents. Is it like parental monitoring software, like on my laptop I've got parental monitoring software and controls.

Mike: Well, sort of yes and no. It does many of the same things, but it does it in a different way. What we do is we ask the parent to log on to our site, create their own name and password, so that they'll have their own private dashboard and then enter their child's login name and password to Facebook. That allows us to go through a portal that Facebook provides to folks like us and enter Facebook and look at everything that's on the child's Facebook wall, their photos, things that are being said, basically, everything that's going on about that child on Facebook.

Now, you don't have to do anything else. No matter where the child is on Facebook, no matter where they enter from, exit to, no matter where they are, if they're on Facebook, our software monitors their activity and activity that's about them. You don't have to worry about which computer or which keyboard or key logging. If it's Facebook, we're watching it.

Scott: Right.

Mike: As part of your sign in activity on your account, you give us an e-mail where we can send you an alert. When we sense something that you should be aware of, we send you an e-mail. Once a week, we send you a summary and we invite you to come back to the dashboard and take a look at it.

Scott: I noticed that certainly there are the concerns about things like stalking and about dangers to their safety. I would think even more common is just inappropriate content or conversations with their friends or bullying and stuff like that that parents would be concerned about. I noticed on your site that you watch for that. Are you doing that through keywords, or how are you doing that?

Mike: We're doing it with keywords and associative words. Remember that we're about understanding identifications. Well, a string of words that describes an activity could be considered to be an identity. It isn't, but it would be looked at the same way. We look at not just words, but strings of words, and every day we add more words to the look-ups and more words in context to the look-ups so that when a word or series of words or a phrase shows up, we can alert on it and advise a parent that something potentially inappropriate or harmful has been happening. The idea is to not be the nanny over the children.

Scott: Right.

Mike: You really don't want to read your kids diary. You don't. You don't want to know that your daughter's in love with Johnny and Johnny's mean. You don't want to know that. They need their space, and frankly you just don't need to be in the middle of that. Even though you don't want to read your child's diary, if there's something in their diary that is harmful to them or potentially harmful to them, you just want to know what that is, and that's what we do.

Scott: Well, and even now with things like cyber bullying is it has legal implications. It's not even just like prying. There have been many cases of bullying, where somebody is dramatically impacted on the receiving side, but then also there's a legal, potential jail or other things on the people that are posting those comments. Right?

Mike: Well, there's certainly that, and the law enforcement agencies are paying a lot of attention to that now fortunately and that's a good thing. It's against the law in most states to do that, but there's a whole raft of things that you want to know. As an example, if your 13-year-old, I'm just going to say 13, how's that?

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: If your 13-year-old is on Facebook at 3:00 in the morning, you probably should know that.

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: And it doesn't mean that there's necessarily anything bad going on.

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: What it means is you have a child that's up in the middle of the night on their computer communicating with other people.

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: You probably ought to know that.

Scott: Well, just setting up basic parental controls and alerts to help control that medium.

Mike: Absolutely. Today I was at the bank. I had to get some money transferred, and I was visiting with the bank president. Great guy, and he asked me what I was doing and I described this to him. He said, "God, I talked to a friend last week." I hear this all the time. "Talked to a friend last week whose daughter's 13 and she's on Facebook." They finally sat down and went through what was going on and discovered that she's been communicating with two boys in Wyoming that they don't know.

Scott: Oh, no.

Mike: They're trying to get her to say things and do things and show things, and the parents are just shattered.

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: Shattered to think that their daughter would even tolerate that, but shattered to think that their daughter's at that kind of risk and they didn't know it.

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: When we were kids, we were generally speaking a step or so ahead of our parents. It took them a little bit of time to catch up with us and what was going on, but generally you knew who people's friends were. You knew them from school or church or relatives. Well, now that's just not true. The kids are moving so fast. They're three or four steps ahead of parents and can't catch up.

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: The parents are powerless to be involved and active on a consistent basis. So MinorMonitor allows them to do that fairly easily.

Scott: Yeah, well, I mean as a parent of four, I know that for sure I wouldn't let my kids on Facebook without something along these lines. I do have a question for you is, why hasn't Facebook done this, or why wouldn't they do this in the future? It seems like a very obvious thing for them to do.

Mike: I'm going to use a terrible analogy. Years and years and years ago, I was putting a pool into my house, and I was thinking about the kids falling in the pool. I sat down and designed, because I'm one of those people, designed a little float mechanism that would measure the change in the surface of the pool. If one of the kids fell in the pool, it sent off an alarm. I told it to the guy at the pool company and said, "You guys should do this. I mean this would be great." And the guy said, "When people have stars in their eyes and they're getting ready to think about barbecues outside, and everybody's swimming in the pool and having fun, talking to them about their children drowning is a good buzz killer."

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: Now, that's an awful story, but if you just apply that to Facebook for a moment. Facebook is in the business of connecting hundreds of millions of people together in ways that have never been done before and to find ways to monetize those connections and those relationships, and they really don't want to sit down and talk about your child, God help us, hanging themselves because they've been bullied or your 13-year-old girl being sexually molested by somebody. To be fair, you can't blame them.

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: Really understanding our kids and where they're at and what they're doing is up to us as parents. Although you look at Facebook and say, "Well gosh, maybe they should do this," they didn't, so we are.

Scott: Yeah. Well, it makes a lot of sense to me, and I really think that what you've got is something that's essential and needed.

Mike: Thanks.

Scott: I wish you the best of luck, and thanks for taking the time today.

Mike: Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to hear us and tell your friends. It's www.MinorMonitor.com and it's free.

Scott: Great. Well, I'll definitely check it out and pass the word. So thanks a lot.

Mike: Fantastic. Thanks, Scott.