Monday, May 11, 2009
Tower 48 - Our New Software Escrow Company

Some of you – especially those of you who are either on Facebook or Twitter – may have already seen this: We are launching a new company at TechEd 2009 called “Tower 48”. I would like to give you a quick overview of what we are doing and why I think it is cool and why I am so excited about it :-).

So basically, what we are doing with Tower 48 is Software Escrow. This may sound like boring legal stuff, but read on! It actually gets pretty cool. If you never had to deal with escrow, here is the quick explanation: Has a customer ever asked you “what happens if you get run over by a bus?”. The answer to this is “we put all our stuff into escrow, so if something happens, you get it all”. The customer is protected, and you don’t have to give anything up you don’t want to give up. The trouble with escrow in general is that it is an expensive legal hassle. We are changing that. And not just that, but we are actually turning it into something that can turn into a profit center for you!

For one, we are making things less expensive and going through the whole process takes just a few minutes. While with most escrow companies, you will spend thousands of $ a year and you are charged every time you update the stuff you have in escrow, and so forth. With us, the default deal is that for about 30 bucks a month, you can put up to 5 products into escrow for 5 people, as long as you don’t use up more than 5GB of storage (which is a lot of source code or other digital assets... you can put anything into our escrow system that is a file). Secondly, it is all high tech, and SOA based. No more of this “put a box into a secret underground vault” nonsense. Use our web site, or use our services to integrate into the build process or your ecommerce web site.

But here is the real kicker: With Tower 48, you can add escrow automatically to your sales process and actually make a profit of it! For instance, if you are selling a $199 product, you could add a little checkbox to your web site that says “for an extra $X, we will put the source code into escrow”. Make X whatever it needs to be to sell. 99 bucks? No problem. $9.95? Sure! $5,000? No problem either. We will work out a deal with you where you can charge an appropriate and reasonable amount, regardless of whether you are selling a $1.99 iPhone app, or a product with a $500,000 license fee. (And keep in mind that there are other things that can be put into escrow. Whether that's additional documentation and information, or whether it is DRM free versions of digital content you sell, and so forth...). We want you to keep most of that fee as pure profit, and we are taking a cut of it to perform the service. Doing it is very simple, and in times like these, it sure doesn’t hurt to add a potential profit stream with no cost associated if nobody ever buys it, does it?

You can check it out at www.Tower48.com. We also have a video that explains the system on that site at www.Tower48.com/videos.aspx. For those of you who can get videos in their RSS feeds are are reading this online, here it is:

Anyway: If you are at TechEd, stop by one of our booths. I will be either at the CODE (isle 100) or Tower 48 (isle 600) booths a good amount of time.