Innovations and Disruptions: How miFon is Redefining Security for Smartphones

An Interaction with miFon | TelecomDrive.com 

Smartphones have gained tremendous importance, not only as a tool to communicate but also as a companion where we store critical data – securing such devices becomes extremely important. Keeping this in mind, ‘miFon’ – an initiative focused around enabling complete security for smartphones – is redefining how security is designed and delivered for such devices.

Abhijit Barua, Founder & Strategist, miFon.moBi interacts with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com and soicsusses how miFon is providing its innovative offerings for ODMs and end customers, globally as well as in India.

What are the key priorities that you have today as an organisation?

As an organisation, we want people to enjoy life without the day to day worries of life. MIFON platform delivers complete security for the 3 loves of one's life: family, phone & private data, without hassles, efficiently and using what is available in a smartphone.

We harness the ever increasing and tremendous capabilities & power of today’s smartphone to reduce the hassles and worries of our daily lives. We identify value denied to users by listening to them and innovating to plug the gaps. Focusing on the human part of the problem solution, enables us to stay ahead, fresh and unique.

How do you look at securing mobile device ecosystems? How can you help ODMs and operators in this regard?

With the advent of the Smartphone age, the fastest growing gadget ever, the use has gone from communication to shopping, banking, payments, news & entertainment. All this has resulted in a host of security concerns to it’s users and majority of security breaches today, starts from the smartphone, as it is mobile, carried all the time and off course is a repository of value.

A lost smartphone can cost it’s users many times more then it’s mere replacement, if it falls in to wrong hands. 91% of smartphone users have security concerns and none of the current offerings can provide complete security reliably and efficiently, as most of them have either come from the PC era or their revenue model is delivering advertisements.

The end user focused approach, is the value that MIFON brings in to the mobile device ecosystems. It’s no longer sustainable to differentiate with screen size, pixels, cpu speed as these are commoditised. As an organisation, we believe in value co-creation through partnerships and the learnings from our engagement with a leading smartphone manufacturer is that MIFON integrated with their devices, have enabled them to differentiate positively in their customer’s mind and delight customers, by showing that they care for their well being.

User’s propensity to buy, doubled with MIFON value proposition added. Mobile operators ecosystem, the OTT players have taken all but the security piece and we believe there is a huge opportunity for mobile operators to co-create value with MIFON to achieve a better user value proposition and win customer loyalty and improve customer lifecycle value.

What is your go to market strategy and what are your key geographies today?

Our GTM strategy evolves from our core philosophy of co-creation of value and thus is based on partners. Mobile Operators & OEMs and their ecosystem form the first set of partners. Another set of partners are the financial services & insurance sectors. In most cases, apart from the MIFON end user value, there are interesting possibilities for MIFON platform to enable unique & disruptive services.

“We are currently in the process of rolling out in 14 countries across Asia, Middle East & Europe”

Our first strategic partnership with a Smartphone OEM, was a result of elucidating the value that MIFON can co-create and is a win-win partnership that delivers value across the value chain.

We are currently in the process of rolling out in 14 countries across Asia, Middle East & Europe, by partnering with 25 mobile operators across with direct billing integration. Alongside, we are working with mobile operators, smartphone OEM eco-system, financial & insurance companies across the globe to create unique products to help end users get better value, using the MIFON platform. In the next 2 years, as we will be rolling out product extensions with wearables & IOT enabled devices to address specific needs in the children, women & elderly safety domains, which will be driven through offline and online eco-system partnerships.

What kind of product innovation are you as an organisation driving today?

MIFON’s product innovation is completely user centric. We look at value denied by current solutions and innovate to address these value gaps. It’s a continuous journey. For instance, we realised that most established security solutions are bespoke and have a revenue model that has direct conflict of interest with the user’s security context.

Change is the only context, so only way forward is continously listening to users and constant innovation. MIFON addresses this by creating the platform that’s tightly integrated with the operating system. Next since our revenue model is direct, rather than offering placebo features to collect customer data, we don’t have the need.

There are a number of mobile security specialist apps and software available today. How is your solution different?

Good question! And this is something we get asked often, but the answer is simple, there is currently not one solution that addresses the end user concerns & pains neither give confidence to users to use a smartphone to it's potential. All currently available solutions, have the legacy issue, they all come from the Windows-PC era and none has been designed nor created with the smartphone user in mind.

That's one of MIFON's unique differentiator. MIFON is designed keeping the user in the centre and addressing their security needs from a 360 degree view.

There are 3 forte's of MIFON: 

1. Smartest Find My Phone: the Only one that's Ubiquitous
2. Smartest Family Security: staying connected 24x7x Anywhere without needing to call & smart SOS Panic 'button'.
3. Automated device security - set it & forget it - anti-malware, device fitness & private data backups

And we hear from many users how most other  security apps  has been making their smartphone slow or draining battery or  consuming their data pack,  MIFON is architected to have minimal resource footprint and it does not hog a smartphone's battery, cpu, memory or data pack, even as it works tirelessly 24x7.

What is your user base today and how do you plan to grow this in the near future?

Currently we have close to 500,000 active users and over 1 million mifon enabled devices. We target to grow 500% and reach the5 million mark in the next 12 months basis our current strategic engagements with our strategic partners.

We will be shortly starting our B2C evangelisation across social ,digital and other medias, to make aware how one can make their Smartphones Smarter and get complete security for the 3 loves of life and enjoy life hassle free.