A Cinderella Story
Toronto-Based ICT Company Goes Global

A chance meeting at an Ontario-sponsored trade booth has transformed a small Toronto mobile device software company into a leading player in a $1 billion global industry. The Cinderella story began last in March in Las Vegas where Fixmo Inc. joined the Ontario, Canada team at CTIA, the wireless industry's premier international trade show.

At the show, a potential partner that would top any supplier's efforts to raise their global profile, approached Rick Segal, Fixmo's CEO & Founder.

The two individuals who sought him out represented the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) Technical Transfer Program. The NSA was also exhibiting at the trade show in an effort to find collaborators to commercialize some of its technologies. They had learned about Fixmo's innovative line of products by visiting the booth and by reading the trade show catalogue.

Fixmo's NSA contract is an exclusive licensing agreement that supports the agency's AutoBerry product, developed to safeguard the hundreds of thousands of mobile devices now used by governments worldwide. Through the technology transfer, these customers will rely on Fixmo's commercial AutoBerry version, known as Sentinel, for support and improvements.

Sentinel software ensures mobile devices start and stay in a known secure state. It can detect in near real time whether mobile devices have been tampered with or compromised. Segal says the NSA deal is a huge boost to Fixmo's business growth plans. "Being associated with NSA is the gold standard," he says.

Seven months later at Orlando's Gartner ITexpo, as part of its NSA contract, Fixmo launched the Safe Zone, another powerful new solution to help manage the risk associated with employees' personal mobile devices on company networks.

With the Safe Zone in place, employees can access their personal mobile devices without any restrictions and the added assurance that their personal information will remain private.

Mr. Segal is far from reserved about his company's global ambitions.

His stated goal is for Fixmo to become the dominant player in mobile risk management, or integrity assurance. Segal says it's a $1 billion global opportunity and he expects Fixmo to reap a very large chunk of that new business.

Meanwhile, Fixmo will continue to refine, improve and market its other major product, the critically acclaimed Fixmo Tools. Initially developed for the BlackBerry, Fixmo hopes to launch an Android Tools version in May with an iPhone package currently in the works.

Designed to make a smart phone smarter, Fixmo Tools includes 17 applications in one convenient software download. With these "tools," a mobile device user can perform a variety of additional tasks, from retrieving a deleted message to printing documents from a remote location.

Other Fixmo Tools include:

• MeetMe which automatically inserts available times from one's calendar into an email when trying to set up a meeting;
  
  
• Mail Compliance Manager which filters inappropriate language from an email and warns the sender if an email is about to go to an unintended recipient (i.e., if you are "replying all" although you received a blind copy);
  
  
• Silencer which automatically shuts off the phone during a meeting scheduled through the device's software;
  
  
• SMS Recovery which backs up all text messages; and
  
  
• Forward Reply with Edit which allows a sender to edit an original message when forwarding, enabling the sender to pass on only what is relevant.

Fixmo is a truly inspiring made-in Ontario success story with a straight forward plan for the future.

In a November 2011 interview with the Financial Post, Tyler Lessard, Fixmo's chief marketing officer touched upon his company's strategy going forward, "We're going to continue to invest in building solutions for government, which is where we have many of our customers today. But we're also going to expand out our product portfolios to address the growing need in enterprise and small business around mobile device security, compliance management and the BYOD [bring your own device] trend."

As a forward-thinking company, Fixmo has the ICT products and services the world is looking for today, as well as tomorrow.