[avidanr]

Ok. I think I understand. I'm gonna step right out there and show my bias. I absolutely HATE the iLok. I bought myself a laser cutter for my wedding (she got a ring, i got a 90watt), and it came with an iLok for the horrible software that the chinese company built. It just takes up a USB port i could otherwise use.

That being said, its a great tool for very big, old software companies that have to protect from pirating.

I think that you have an entirely different play at hand. Because you are building a platform, you dont care if people pirate. What you just want to be sure of is that people aren't sharing logins. Soooo....just make the logins tie to personal info. Back in the day, when I used to send sensitive PDFs, I would just make the password on the PDF the recipients last 4 of their SSN. I could basically guarantee they wouldnt send the PDF around. The equivalent in your situation is to use Oauth with something like LinkedIn or Google. For the users to share your account, they would need to create an fake LinkedIn or Google account...and if you system is all about lead generation, that becomes crippling.

Overall, i dont care about iLok vs another form of protection. For me, the most important thing you are thinking about is can you create an amazing amount of value for your customer. Can you get them hooked, and improve their (business) life. If you can, then you can put a dollar amount on that improvement. I used Bloomberg terminals many moons ago, and it was not the best software in the world, but the data was immensely valuable. So we paid.

Good luck!

[6stringmerc]

Great response and thanks for your time and input. You're not stepping on my toes noting a dislike of the iLok - it actually finished off my interest in ProTools and sent me deep into Ableton Live years ago. I think you definitely grasp what I'm going for in concept, and parlayed that into useful guidance.

As you mentioned about Bloomberg, it's the data that's primarily of value, and from what I've experienced, the communications platform limited access via other terminals are two driving factors for why they're used.

Your point about value to the customer is good for me to keep in mind. The whole idea I have is an intersection of publicly available financial information, marketing, government business, and with a scope of service that would span over several months to possibly more than a year. It could be enhanced by arragements for data sharing with certain established industry players (ex: Thomson Reuters). I'm reluctant to call it an SaaS platform, but maybe I should just frame it as such for practical reasons.

On a different note, how interested would you be in a concept for a recreational personal flight device?

It's what I'm going to submit for the Intel Curie contest, but that's like a TV show thing and could go sideways on me. I'm pretty proud of my R&D thus far on the concept and would probably like the challenge of putting together a pitch for it (that I could also use in my contest entry). Just curious!

[avidanr]

ill give you a great quote on building planes (or human carrier drones).

"When failure is not an option, success becomes very expensive" -chris lewicki