Tony and Andrew, this is a response to your recent posts on RB regarding licensing revenue:
Significant licensing revenues from security applications will probably depend upon mass deployment of the Embassy chip, whereas this type of revenue may be much more limited if Embassy is only installed on the 3 to 5 million PCs estimated for this year. Over the next several years Wave would need to reach a critical mass in their installed base of many millions in order to attract a large volume of application license fees. Also, as bigtim has stated, Wave will probably need to first arrange a credit facility secured by quantifiable licensing revenues in order to fund chip deployment.
I'm confident that Wave will be able to obtain the necessary funds, however that is accomplished, because the potential revenues are enormous when you consider the vast number of business and even personal software applications that will want to have a security and copyright interface with an ubiquitous Embassy chip.
Additionally, certain applications could directly benefit from being embedded in the Embassy chip. Several that come to mind are bank credit cards and e-postage companies like E-Stamp, the latter being a company that could reduce the cost of deploying each e-postage system from roughly $40 to $4 if it were embedded in Embassy.
The following are excerpts from the Embassy web pages that highlight the potential for licensing revenue from a wide spectrum of software applications:
”The trusted-client technology has been designed as a very open and flexible platform that can provide a very broad range of security functions, distributed transactions and protected application execution. Therefore, it will be valuable to local, national and international organizations across virtually every industry where security and distributed operations are a requirement. For the PC industry, the trusted-client capability will bring a new wave of application investment and services to the PC platform…Other requirements include secret key storage, the secure loading and execution of applications and end-to-end security of communications with the device.
“It was the business and technical design goal for the trusted-client system to be open, support industry standards and to seamlessly integrate into a broad range of environments. The system supports the Microsoft Crypto Application Programming Interface (MS CAPI), as well as Intel's Cryptographic Data Security Architecture (CDSA). It will provide access through public key infrastructure to include leading RSA algorithms and support for digital certificates from VeriSign, which supplies X.590 certification.
”Applications for the trusted-client can be written using standard "C" programming language, in addition to Java Card, which is widely used for Smart Card applications.
The last paragraph is particularly telling. BTW, concerning licensing revenue, I wouldn't be surprised if Wave has already received revenues from some of the new partners like Sigma and NEC (Pollex fingerprint ID system) who have announced plans to integrate Embassy in their hardware. I suppose we'll have to wait until the next quarterly report is out before confirmation of this is available. The receipt of licensing fees would explain the postponement of a new financing package.
Wahoograd |
