Former Ikanos exec sheds Lite on e-mail

Richard Sekar, who previously was vice president of marketing for Ikanos and one of the most outspoken proponents of VDSL, is unveiling a new venture that is about as far away from the intricacies of chip manufacturing as possible. The company, Liteband, is focused on providing children with e-mail addresses that are safe from both inappropriate spam and forced advertisements.

Using a password-based security system, the Freemont, Cal.-based company is selling the service to both ISPs as well as carriers, who then market it to parents.

“It’s pretty obvious there are too many spam e-mails,” Sekar said, noting that the way most ISPs handle spam is by dumping them into a “bulk” folder. “A lot of times, though, your bulk folder will have good e-mails. It’s to the point that you can’t give kids a Yahoo! ID. I won’t give my own kids their own IDs.”

The Liteband service works by requiring sends to put in a keyword into the body copy of any e-mail sent. The keyword can be anything the user chooses. The concept has been used before, but usually by putting in a keyword in a specific location of the e-mail header or subject line.

“We knew how to store the password, but we didn’t know how to hide it,” Sekar said. “If you have the keyword or password and attach it to a particular location, spammers will use automated tools to mine that. Eventually we came to the conclusion that the best place to hide it was in the open.”

When kids give friends their Lightband ID to anyone, they also must tell them their password, Sekar said, adding that the keyword can virtually any combination of letters.

“It’s like an unlisted e-mail service,” he said. “So even if a spammer gets a copy of the e-mail ID, they can’t send anything. It’s not cost effective for spammers to manually look for each and every password.”

Currently the company is raising series A funding and is targeting ISPs with heavy concentration of dial-up users. However, as more users shift to broadband, the technology doesn’t change, Sekar said.

“The value proposition also doesn’t go away with broadband,” he said. “A lot of times, the simplest solutions are the best.”