David: I understand your claim that service is a big part of what you're selling. What services are you offering?

Wade: The Sereniti Smart Home Networking Service is "bumper-to-bumper" support for the home network. We handle all antivirus and antispyware definition updates, updates to the firmware of the Smart Home Server, and our customer care center is available 24x7 to assist with any issue our customers may face with their home network.

Because of our advanced diagnostic software, we are able to resolve a vast majority of our customer issues within 20 minutes. This is extremely impressive when you consider that support calls like this with other companies can routinely run two and three times that duration.

We understand that our customers don't want to sit on the phone going over the basic environment questions and want to get to the issue at hand. We are able to do that and we enjoy a very high satisfaction rating from our customers because of our dedication to using the technology effectively to simplify their lives.

David: So you don't have antivirus and spyware at the box, but on the PC? I'd think it'd be very valuable to keep viruses and spyware outside the firewall. Aren't you missing a real opportunity here?

Wade: In a world that is increasingly mobile, it is not sufficient to place the protections at the edge of the network. And, even if you did that, you would also need to have them on the PC so that you are protected from viruses transmitted by CDs, floppy disks or flash drives. In addition, network-based protections don't secure you when you are at a hotel, the local coffee shop or Internet hotspot. Sereniti provides up to four copies of our Sereniti Security Suite with our service to ensure that each PC on the network has the latest antivirus and antispyware protection.

David: Your customer service and technical support is offshore. There's a big backlash here in the U.S. against offshore support. While I love Dell machines, I know I better not need any customer support or service because their offshore support is dreadful. To horribly mix metaphors, as a startup, isn't this a big strike against you right out of the gate?

Wade: Not at all. Our business model is to provide best-in-class service beyond what consumers can currently find today. Equipment manufacturers make money from selling hardware and look for every way to reduce the cost of support. At Sereniti, since customers are buying our service, we place great emphasis on ensuring that our service is one that consumers will rave about (and they do).

In that regard you can liken Sereniti to a home security company that installs sophisticated hardware in the home to enable their service. In much the same way, our Sereniti Smart Home server enables us to provide unparalleled customer support.

What's unique about our support solution is we've taken a hybrid approach to delivering service. At a transactional level, the agents offshore are providing service and interacting with end users. They are specially trained to provide knowledge based solutions; not scripted technical support that quickly goes down hill the first time a subscriber deviates from the script.