Trust is the foundation of both personal and corporate business success. And VeriSign, a $1.5 billion Mountain View company, has built its business by marketing trust.
It does this through its encryption technology, which helps consumers trust online merchants, media companies sell authentic entertainment and communications companies transmit reliable information.
VeriSign is a stunning example of how a technology company can morph into a significant corporation by leveraging expertise, acquisitions and trends. It began, 12 years ago, by selling digital certificates for Web sites as a spin-off from RSA Security. Now its certificates protect more than 750,000 secure Web sites, including 93 percent of the Fortune 500. Last week, the Computer History Museum celebrated the 30th anniversary of the public-private key encryption technology, created by MIT researchers Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, that led to the founding of RSA.
Today, when you visit a domain name on the Web, chances are VeriSign is helping you route your request. It may resolve 31 billion domain name requests in a day. It has recently upgraded its systems to handle 2 trillion requests a day and will double that capacity in the future.
The growth of cell phones on the Internet will create unprecedented demands on routing messages reliably and securely. Last week, at the cell phone industry’s CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment show, in San Francisco, VeriSign won Streaming Media magazine’s prize for the best content management platform for digital media.
That technology came from VeriSign’s acquisition of Kontiki. You can use it on Palo Alto’s Open Media Network. To see videos and TV programs, some free, some paid, go to www.omn.org and download a viewer. It works on most PCs (a Vista version is not available despite a support forum saying it would be out by late summer) and Macs. If you are in the U.K., you can also view the BBC and Channel 4 on a PC using VeriSign’s technology. Unfortunately, access is blocked for overseas viewers.
Another VeriSign project was supporting the Live Earth concerts with text messaging. The audience could send a text message saying they would switch off lights, car pool, buy fluorescent light bulbs, promote Live Earth or pledge support. VeriSign supported 65 mobile phone operators across four continents for the event alone.
Every day, VeriSign carries 200 million text messages between operators that originate on mobile phones. This seems a huge number until you realize that, according to the CTIA, in June 2007 nearly 1 billion messages were sent per day in the U.S. alone.
VeriSign is pushing to display content on three screens: TV, computer and mobile phone. You can view its Three-Screen Showcase, sample movies from Lionsgate, on www.verisign.tv. At the show, I joked that they need to support a fourth screen, the Apple iPhone, which cannot play Flash or execute Java. By 2009, everyone is going to be watching movies on their mobile phone, from grandmothers watching babies to teenagers idolizing entertainers.
Not to be outdone by Facebook’s rapidly escalating popularity, fueled by Microsoft’s $240 million investment, KickApps has a deal with VeriSign to bring social media to mobile devices. They power the Special Olympics community site, www.the-gym.org, helping viewers of the October games in Shanghai rally behind athletes and their causes.
Bamboo MediaCasting (www.bamboomc.com) has partnered with VeriSign to enable podcasts and videos to be sent to mobile phones. VeriSign’s technology sends mobile media to phones when networks are at off-peak times to minimize network congestion and enable users to listen when they are not connected. You can check out Bamboo’s podcasts on www.mediatoob.com — here, at least, iPhone users are already ahead with iTunes.
Expect VeriSign’s acquisitions and partnerships to pay off over the next few years as mobile entertainment explodes, even if they may be costly investments in the short term.
Angela Hey can be reached at amhey@techviser.com.
