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NetworkWorld Live TV interviews Droplet Inc. co-founder and CEO Philip S.J. Brittan
NW: We're NetworkWorld Live TV here on the show floor at Networld+Interop and today we're talking to Philip Brittan, who is the CEO and co-founder of Droplet, Inc. Philip, how are you doing today? PB: Very well, thank you. NW: And how's your show experience going here at N+I? This is your company's first time here? PB: It is our first time. And, we're launching our products here at the show. NW:Terrific. PB: It's going extremely well. We're over in the Microsoft Pavilion, booth 50, and we're getting a lot of traffic. Everybody that has visited us has loved what we've got to show and so it's been really great for us.  NW: Tell us about what you are showing, in that case. We know it's a new product, a new company. What's attracting the attention over there? PB: The product is called Droplets, like the company, and it's a technology infrastructure for delivering on-line applications that we feel for the very first time are truly Net-native applications. By that, I mean, that we are bridging the gap between the universal accessibility that you have to the Web and Web applications, and the rich user experience and direct access you get from locally installed software applications to turn these two very different worlds into one, intuitive continuum. NW: So, for the user and customer, what are the benefits of that? PB: The benefit to end-users is they get a really empowering experience. When they go to Web sites, they get personalized, rich, very easy to use, very fast services that can be extended to them, and that they can take out of a Web site, literally drag out off a Web site and drop on their desktop. And the benefit to businesses is that they can extend these kinds of services to their users, right to the user's desktop and develop deeper relationships than they currently are able to do with strictly a Web-based interface.  NW: So, it sounds as though you have a dual customer base there that you'll be serving. You'll be selling it to end-user customers as well as to businesses selling to users? Is that right? PB: We sell our technology to businesses. We enable businesses to create these kinds of services and extend them to their end-users. However, our focus is very much on empowering the end-user. We believe if we make a fantastic experience for the end-user, put the end-user in control, value will accrue to the businesses that use Droplets. NW: It seems as though this particular type of technology requires you to have certain partnerships with other companies out here. Is that correct? PB: Yes. Absolutely. NW: What do these companies do that you're looking to partner with? What types of companies are they? PB: We're actively seeking partnerships with e-enabling firms, Web and application development firms who are helping their customers get on line, or helping their on-line customers find new ways to reach their users. So, for instance, we've just signed a strategic alliance with a shop in New York and Asia called Delirium. We're going to be taking our software development kit and developing solutions for their customers. We're also partnering with product companies that have products and services that we can bundle our solutions with. We also just announced a relationship with Critical Path, with whom we have created an end-to-end on-line e-mail product that businesses or Web sites can license and add to their sites extremely easily with the robust, world-renowned Critical Path back-end and a very innovative easy-to-use Droplets front-end.  NW: It's a very interesting sounding product. How did you come to develop it in the first place? PB: Our background is in financial services. I've run several companies before. We've been developing applications and Web sites for financial services firms, primarily in the risk management, derivatives trading area. And we realized several years ago that applications were increasingly going to move on the Web. We also realized that in order to develop the kind of applications that we were used to developing for financial services that the Web was not a good medium. We needed an extremely easy-to-use, intuitive, very, very fast helpful interface that traders could use. They have to be able to make split-second decisions, and we needed to be able to push live data out to them. And the Web, which today is really designed more for magazine content, for brochure-ware, for product catalogs and documents, was not really well suited for this. So we created Droplets, which is a complementary technology to the Web, to the Web browser, to allow businesses to publish true interactive, easy-to-use, live applications. NW: So, it sounds like it's an innovative and breakthrough product in many ways. And folks here at N+I, tens of thousands of you, can wander over to the Microsoft Pavilion, and seek out booth 50, where you can find Philip Brittan and the rest of the Droplet crew over there who will be glad to talk with you and walk you through some of their products. PB: Absolutely. NW: Well, thank you very much for joining us here at NetworkWorld Live TV, Philip. And thank you for joining us as well out there. PB: Thanks for having me.
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