Smart Baby offers smart security new

LOGSCREEN:LOSING A LAPTOP is a huge hassle. Losing it with a client's confidential or sensitive data on board is a nightmare. Start-up company LogScreen has developed a solution to the problem initially aimed at auditing firms, but with applications across many sectors.

“An audit in a large organisation will involve a team of people and a large part of any audit or consultancy process is capturing and recording information,” says company co-founder Karl Schäckermann. “The distribution of this information on various laptops and servers creates three major problems: confidential data is being handed around ad hoc, there is a high risk of data loss, theft and misuse and expensive hours are being lost through redundant work processes such as comparing different document versions.”

LogScreen’s answer is BabyOne, which combines existing hardware components and innovative software in an easy-to-use mobile device that stores all sensitive data centrally and securely with automatic encryption and back-up. Each team member’s laptop is connected to BabyOne by wireless technology. This does away with data being handed out on unsecured media such as USB keys. If the BabyOne device itself is stolen, the data it contains can be remotely deleted.

“There is no one currently offering a comprehensive solution to the problem of sensitive data on the move,” Schäckermann says. “Ultimately there is nothing to stop someone else doing what we’re doing as it’s a difficult idea to patent, but we have first-mover advantage and very detailed knowledge of the auditing and risk-management sectors respectively. This project would also be too small to be of interest to big players in the IT industry but it’s big enough to be of great interest to a small company like ours.”

Schäckermann estimates that any of the top five global auditing firms would need about 7,000 devices to service their international client bases. Each device costs €7,500.

LogScreen is based at Nova, UCD’s Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre. It recently won the most promising start-up award at the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown 2011 County Enterprise Awards. BabyOne is being made by Euroflex in Cork and will go on the market by the end of March 2012. The company is now looking to raise about €500,000 to bring the project to the next stage.