CASERO BLOG - Jay Deen, VP Technology
Hello my name is Jay Deen. I am one of the founding employees of Casero; I am the VP of Technology. Casero is looking to provide innovative insight while also offering a great user experience and value to the end customer. Casero was incorporated six years ago - with a fairly straight forward mission, to create value added services for broadband providers. Some of the history on the founding of Casero - many of us originally came from an IP billing company called Solect Technology Group. At Solect we had the pleasure of working with over 60 internet service providers. One of the interesting perspectives of being at the early inception of the commercial internet was many providers knew they had to provide access but the business models around how to charge for access were varied. Originally providers billed for minutes online, data transferred, some charged for web hits on servers, e-mail addresses, ftp access etc. As things normalized we saw many differing needs to charge and rate for services (which at times caused it's own challenges!) but we never saw the true emergence or real value added services - we also realized that as pricing wars increased and the number of online access providers decreased - the market would slowly converged on the phone and cable companies and with competition broadband service would become a commodity. What these providers required were ways to differentiate their services while providing real value to their consumers, but we didn't see the services emerging. Today there are many examples of value added services - but many are not provided by the broadband access providers - but rather by other players. We at Casero believe the premium value added services should be offered by access providers - for a number of reasons. Technically they can insure a great level of service along a number of broadband access points - including mobile and fixed networks. They can also make sure that the services tie in to the devices they provide and make sure there is a great user experience - that enhances the digital lifestyle. Enhancing the digital lifestyle is something we are very passionate about at Casero. To provide real lifestyle enhancing services and applications requires a full solution - not just software and software platforms but ways to tie in devices, and connections - leveraging personalization and contextual search that create a simple, ease to use and valuable experience, for the subscriber and their communities of interest. Well this is my first blog post. The hope is to keep people in the loop on what is going on in the industry; on what our innovative customers are doing and trends we see in the market at large.