[vegas]

This application needs to be something that runs on an open source ti-86 equivalent piece of hardware with no network connections and a battery life of forever instead of an iphone application, and then it will actually be successful. Until then, anyone smart enough to actually give a shit isn't going to be particularly interested.

People would certainly be more inclined to trust Microsoft, Apple, or Google with this sort of task than Joe Startup, and they haven't yet. Therefore, while this is a valid need, and really a very big market opportunity, I don't buy that anyone will succeed commercially with it unless they just set themselves up as the distributors of commodity open source hardware that does the job.

People do make shitloads of money selling commodities.

[brennenHN]

The network connection is an integral part of what makes our system work, and the ubiquity of smartphones is what makes it viable at scale. In terms of trusting a startup, we're working on exposing more of what we're doing to demonstrate its safety. The first part of that is a paper we're working on publishing this Spring at security conferences that details how Clef works using best practices and established security protocols to keep a user's information safe.

[cheald]

I'd like to say, big props for talking earnestly about your solutions to these problems -- that really does go a long way towards building trust. I've seen startups that basically take the "it's secret sauce, we can't tell you how it works!" approach, and that's more or less the kiss of death for anyone in security. :)

[brennenHN]

Thanks! We definitely want to be open about what we're doing to help demonstrate the safety we're offering. Making that dialog intelligible to users of different sophistications in terms of security knowledge is a major challenge for us.