In the video below, Michael Saylor, CEO and founder of MicroStrategy (MSTR 1.69%) and author of The Mobile Wave, visits The Motley Fool to discuss tech, business, and social trends as they relate to investors today.
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Michael Saylor: We've created a product called Usher, which allows you to dematerialize a credit card or a passport or a student ID to something running on a smartphone.
Once you do that, you can't lose your ID. No one can steal the ID. You can't tamper with it, you can't counterfeit it, and you can take that ID and you can use it as a key to open up any computer system. It's a simple, elegant solution to cyber security, and to eliminate hacking.
There is no password. We're dematerializing a password. If I just have my ID on my phone, I want to log into a system, I have the system just hit me with a barcode, scan the barcode, the system opens up. There's no keystrokes to log, there's no password to lose, there's no password to guess.
You could steal my phone. What good is that to you? It locks itself. You can't guess my phone.
The point is, there's a much better way to do things. We're using that and taking that into banks and to telephone companies. My focus right now is, how do I create mobile software that will run on hundreds of millions, or billions, of peoples' handsets?
I think that's so much more important than whether or not you're going to sell software that runs on top of 5,000 analysts' workstations; I don't even much get myself focused on it.
There's 100 million organizations in the world that have obsolete credentials; everybody from the Social Security Department to... There's 15 million small retailers in India. There's five million small retailers in the U.S. Everybody's got an ID card. Everybody's got something. None of it works.
A Social Security card is your name and a bunch of numbers on it. I could use yours and get a job, my roommate can use mine. A national health care card, they're all easy to fraud. I could take your health care card and go get $100,000 of health care. They wouldn't ask.
Ten million credit cards get left in bars every week. There's $220 billion of credit card theft every year. There's a trillion dollars' worth of fraud and vice in the health care business, etc.
I think all of that is ripe to be obliterated by mobile identity. Mobile identity is very exciting for me, and we're investing heavily in that.
