How to Identify Your Competitor’s Business Interest Areas at an Early Stage?

Do you spend hours in your mind palace, thinking where your competitor might be heading next? What could be their next area of interest? Do you have it covered or is it completely untapped?

Well, if you are a technology scout you’d agree that it isn’t always about the hours you put in, but the strategies you plan and implement. The understanding of environmental forces, such as competitors’ dynamics and activities can enhance your organization’s responsiveness to the market. And if you ask me, supplementing your market research and technology analytics is the best way to stay steps ahead of your competitor. 

Let’s take, Averon, for instance. Founded by Wendell Brown, the Company offers automated mobile identity verification technology products to protect digital locks for home, auto, and tech. 

Now,  Brown is a prolific innovator whose creative triumphs include, U.S. and internationally patented inventions in the fields of cybersecurity, telecommunications, mobile phone apps, a virtual workforce, electric vehicles, LED lighting, 3D cameras, renewable fuels, and online music distribution.

From building a global VoIP solution (acquired by Microsoft), founding America’s largest online voicemail platform solution (acquired by AOL) to co-founding Liveops, America’s largest virtual work-at-home call center (honored by the White House in 2010), all contribute to the advancement of technology and betterment of society. Thus giving Wendell Brown a recognition as an innovation peddler that can give a neck to neck fight to the big giants.

This made us wonder, where might Brown be heading next? Is he cooking something that can yet again prove to be game-changing? 

And the very question set our path to join far ended dots with the help of patent analytics and foresee the next steps of Averon in the business.

Shadowing the clandestine moves of your competitor

For the uninitiated, Brown is currently the CEO of Averon. This company, according to Cyber-security Excellence Awards:

[Averon] is the developer of Direct Autonomous Authentication (DAA), the industry’s first automatic and secure mobile identity verification standard. The patented, award-winning, turnkey API solution of DAA has the potential to radically reshape identity and authentication while reducing fraud and data breaches across the enterprise and consumer applications.

Sounds like Brown’s another breakthrough. Huh?

But that’s not it. His research patterns tell us more!

Looks like Brown is after the advertisement business (just like Google). While Averon’s portfolio has security-related patents, after 2015, patents related to the advertisement domain have been assigned to a shell company, Pacific Wave Technology. 

Now, in privacy-war, security/privacy and advertising businesses are almost considered as foes. For example, Google is trying hard to balance these two to save its ad business. Google even launched a completely new branch of Federated learning just to make sure that its advertising business is not affected by privacy concerns. 

In such a scenario, a cyber-security guy filing patents in the advertisement domain, doesn’t add up, right?

So we went further down into the investigation and started locating these patents, joining the dots between security and advertisements. The Latest patents of Wendell and patent assigned to Pacific wave seemed to combine these two north and south poles. They are filing patents that claim to carry on the transaction without breaching any privacy.

Wendell may license the technology using the holding company and launch products that will create a new ecosystem in the fin-tech domain. A system that not only secures user information transactions but also provides a secure way for advertisers. The user does not have to share any personal information (good news for privacy paranoids) and will still get the targeted advertisement, making the advertisers happy (now that’s a Win-Win!). This promise’s to make the classic trade-off between privacy and advertisement a little balanced.

It is a great deal for e-commerce companies. This year, Averon integrated with Okta Inc. on the same lines. (Okta Inc. is an identity management company that connects people with any application on any device. For example, they act as a security layer between customers of big names like Adobe, 20th-century fox, National Geographic.) Now, this integration will give Okta’s clients a way to instantly log into e-commerce accounts and enterprise systems. In official press-release, Averon mentioned:

Okta’s business-to-consumer clients can now deliver a more secure and seamless mobile e-commerce experience while expediting customers through their mobile purchasing journey.

Here, seamless e-commerce experience can be contemplated as better advertisement serving capabilities. If the latter is true, Wendell has solved or is at least near to solve a problem that even big giants are struggling with. It will be interesting to look at future development in this space and at GreyB; we have a canine’s nose for interesting developments!

The Bottom line

In today’s era of cut-throat competition, the only way an organization’s R&D team can stay ahead in research is if they already have intel on what their peers are strategizing and innovating.

Running a business in today’s marketplace is much akin to a game of chess. In order to win, you gotta strategize ahead of your competitors. Competitive intelligence helps you find information about the present and future behavior of your competitors. It reflects its technology & market interests, and potential business relationships.

Want a peek into your competitor’s next business interest and stay a step ahead in the game? 

Well, you don’t even have to sway because we are just a click away! 

Authored by: Sukha Singh, Patent Landscape and Nidhi, Market Research