Randy Troppmann

I recently attended a 3-day “entrepreneur bootcamp” where angel investors taught how to pitch an idea to angel investors for investment capital. One of the first things they will want to know is how you protect your intellectual property. In the case of software, protection of algorithms is key and in the case of Flex your software secrets are protected from a right click “view source” since the application is contained within a compiled swf. Tools are available, however, that allow you to easily decompile the swf and look at the goodies inside.

Simplified Logic Inc has a product that uses a private key encryption method that stops decompilation of the swf. They also have developed a backend system that can manage licenses to your application. I have been developing a Flex application for use in teaching anatomy to students at the technical institute I work at. It has proven to be a powerful tool and there is opportunity to license this application to other institutions, but there is no infrastructure to do this. I have built a proof of concept using Nitro-LM to show that we can deploy this application on the web using a Software as a Service model without creating much of a deployment infrastructure on our end beyond what we already have in place.

The NitroAdmin AIR app is used to set up and manage the encryption and licenses. Videos and examples show how to integrate the system into your Flex app but I think they need to do a bit more work around this … perhaps a “wizard” or video that shows from start to finish the basic setup. It still took a bit of handholding to get me up and running (thanks Andrew). The proof of concept is doing its job of proving this works in a way that is unobtrusive to users. Now all that is left is the easy part: to build a business model around my application and then go out and sell it. That is someone else’s job.

Simplified Logic was a major sponsor of the recent 360 Flex conference in Indianapolis. I want to say thanks to them for supporting this event. It was a good one and I enjoyed the environs.