Founder: Innovation requires security
Phil Dumas cannot be sure where his obsession with access and keys came from.
But he says it might have something to do with his childhood, when he’d often be called home to let his sister in the house after she’d lose or forget her keys. That obsession, however, helped lead the entrepreneur to launch UniKey, a firm that created a smart lock that can be unlocked with a mobile phone or with the touch of a finger.
“Maybe I need to thank her for the frustration that led to [UniKey’s] creation,” Dumas said.
UniKey describes itself as an “Internet-of-things” company, dealing with everyday objects that have Internet connectivity and send and receive data. It recently moved its operations to downtown Orlando. As it moved in, Dumas sat down with Orlando Sentinel tech reporter Marco Santana for this week’s Tech Check podcast. Here are some highlights:
On moving UniKey to Orlando:
It’s a hidden gem of talent. Not a lot of people realize the amount of talent that is in the area. With the university, with all the government contracting in defense, gaming, it’s a great talent pool. Unless people and companies like UniKey stay here, you need to do that in order to start the engine. You need entrepreneurs to have wins and usually when they have wins, they become angel investors and start investing locally and mentoring companies and it starts that perpetual machine. On why he hates keys: I have this hatred for keys and I think it came from my sister … She wasa little older than me and would get home from school earlier. She would use her key to get into the house and she’d set it down on the counter. The next day she was always locked out. Somehow I was the one responsible for coming home from wherever I was and letting her into the house.
On Internet-of-things security risks:
Within the industry, there is a huge concern for security. History generally repeats itself. Look at the alarm industry. People typically don’t think about putting an alarm on until something has happened and something hasn’t happened in our industry yet to trigger the consumer to care. It’s a thankless role UniKey plays with security but our goal is actually to prevent something from happening. So the good news is the industry is talking about security and hopefully to the point where we get ahead of it and consumers don’t ever feel the problems. If a new competitor pops up and gets hacked, it hurts our whole space. We are big fans of telling people this is important and trying to help them out as much as possible to make sure it’s not a buying point.