Talpes is back

He never goes into a meeting or an interview without having a rather thick stack of paper sheets and a ballpoint pen. Mathematician by education, businessman Florin TalpeS designs something in his mind almost all the time and puts every idea he comes up in graphs, even when he only presents something of the past or sums up the strategy of his businesses for the coming period. He did it when he started to think of several new business ideas a number of years ago. Only that the projects of the last five years for the Softwin start-up incubator have not materialised until now, despite investments of several million euros. The year 2010 might change things, Florin Talpes says.

“The biometric recognition system for preventing identity theft has been completed and is waiting to be launched on the market in the first part of next year,” says Softwin group’s chairman. The application is functional, there is a trade name (which Talpes would rather not reveal yet) and the first pilot projects for the application of the system have to be found. For instance, a potential client for biometric recognition could be any banking institution or organisation working with sensitive information, which not even the employees can access in its entirety. Talpes’s engineers have developed the dynamic signature, an application for consumers to sign documents and approve payments without worrying that their signature may be copied.

“Unlike recognition based on fingerprints, which can be easily reproduced with the help of some special rubber, dynamic signature cannot be copied because each person has a special dynamics of motion,” the businessman says. He does not see it going to the public sector, where it is quite difficult to get in despite a potentially high number of projects, but rather the private sector, where the second application devised by the specialists of the Softwin incubator will be used, as well. This is an automated translation product, with only components of this system to be launched at first, starting with a full grammar and writing guide, available as of the first quarter of 2010, while the first version of the translation application will follow towards the end of the year.

For the time being, TalpeS is quite reserved in his expectations of success for the two products, but adds that “if I were to sell the biometric recognition technology alone, I would recoup my investment.”
The businessman outlines the scenarios that BitDefender might follow over the next three years. The first arrow points towards attracting an important investor to provide the company with the necessary funds to expand, with more options, such as floatation, for instance, something that TalpeS has been contemplating for a quite a while, to be taken into account in about two years.

The second arrow points towards an international stock market, such as London, Warsaw or New York, which plan, if put into practice until 2011 at the latest, would render finding an investor unnecessary.”The floatation plan was completely upset by the crisis, a situation that made me postpone the moment for 2011 or 2012,” Talpes says, who believes next year will be decisive for the trajectory the security solution company will follow.

The first steps towards a floatation plan were taken in 2007, when BitDefender turned a separate legal entity. The audit by Ernst & Young followed. “Once the audit for 2009 has been completed we will be ready for the floatation process, so that the only thing we will have to do will be to decide whether this is the best option or not,” the businessman says, without specifying the right price for his business.