Please tell us, what is Soonr all about and what do you do?

Frid-Nielsen:  At Soonr, we are focused on turning tablets into true mobile workstations powered by the cloud.

What are you launching at AlwaysOn? What is the biggest challenge you face right now in telling your story and winning over new clients?

Frid-Nielsen:  We are here to tell our story. Our biggest challenge is to continue to accelerate growth. When you talk about tablets and apps that enable the mobile workforce to be more productive, that's an easy sell. The challenge is to continue to spread the word. We are very excited about a new mobile app, Soonr Scribble, we just announced with Samsung for their new Galaxy Note device, a tablet that comes with a stylus. With Soonr Scribble, business users can easily annotate any document or file stored in the cloud with a stylus. So, for instance, if you receive a document for review, you can easily mark it up, highlight or redline it using the pen.

Who is your target audience and how do you intend to reach them? What is the biggest challenge you face right now in telling your story and winning over new clients?

Frid-Nielsen: Our target audience is different kinds of businesses that work on files and see value in having access and the ability to work on these files from different devices. For instance, many sales-forces are now getting tablets, and with Soonr, they can easily find, show and edit any document in the field.

I'd be curious to hear any general thoughts you have on market trends.

Frid-Nielsen: This is an amazing time with so many disruptive trends taking place at once:  the adoption of mobile devices, like tablets and smart phones; new and faster networks being rolled out; businesses working in new and dynamic ways to stay competitive, and cloud-computing because of its enormous impact on IT.

What is the viral aspect of your product?

Frid-Nielsen:  Our main viral aspect is word of mouth. We believe that it's important to provide our customers with a great service.  As many businesses use our secure sharing functionality with other businesses like their clients, suppliers and consultants, that's also a natural way to get introduced to Soonr.

How will you make money? What's the business model?

Frid-Nielsen: The great thing about selling to businesses is that you can actually charge for the service, so we only have paying customers. Today we have over 80,000 companies paying for our service. The business model is that it's a recurring service fee based on usage-no upfront costs, no expensive hardware for IT to maintain, etc. Customers love it and it's great to have a business where you can generally always expect higher revenues from month to month.

Who are your competitors?
Frid-Nielsen: We see a lot of users come from Dropbox because they tried using it for business. In addition, we see a number of other more consumer oriented cloud-sync and share offerings that are not business focused.

How do you differentiate from your competitors?

Frid-Nielsen: We're different in a number of ways: first, the Soonr service eclipses the simple sync and share functions of many competitors. With Soonr, you can directly edit any document on your iPad or use a stylus on a Samsung Galaxy Note device to annotate files.  Second, we provide deep control features so businesses can easily be in charge and manage their Teams-who have access to what, etc. Third, we have been working with large partners like telcos for years, so our data-center infrastructure is extremely solid and secure. We don't just simply point to Amazon when it comes to security. We operate geo-redundant, HIPAA compliant data-centers in multiple locations around the world like Europe and Canada, so users data doesn't have to travel to the US.

What business or technology could yours disrupt?

Frid-Nielsen: There is a lot of disruption taking place. For instance, Enterprise software is generally changing rapidly. Before, companies would go out and buy Enterprise software that would cost over $100,000, and then buy expensive hardware to run it on and then have people manage it all. With a service like Soonr, we take care of the entire infrastructure, so there  are no expensive upfront investments in hardware or software. We charge a monthly fee that's about the price of a latte per user and can easily scale with the company. Finally, we make things easy to manage and use, so in many cases, business Teams can self-administrate. Of course, if there is an IT dept that wants to take a role in managing Soonr for the company, for instance, the service is rolled out to 1,000 employees, we also offer admin and monitoring features for them. Another aspect of disruption is that companies no longer dictate which devices their employees should use. The days where the entire company uses Blackberries because IT says so are
over. Now, progressive companies let their employees choose their devices and provide services like Soonr that enable work and secure sharing from any device.

Who founded the company, when? What can you tell me about the story of the company's founding?

Frid-Nielsen: We started Soonr in 2005.  We were 3 guys that had been working together for many years. We felt it was time to start our own company. We had a vision around mobility and access to files. This started when we got together for a Christmas party in 2004 in Denmark. We all pulled out our mobile phones and tried to share information.  At that time it was impossible and we have continued to expand the company by being aggressive users of our own technology, after all, we are all business people that are totally depending on our files and mobile devices, so we are our own target audience.

What is your distribution model? Where to buy your product?

Frid-Nielsen:  We offer Soonr through our website Soonr.com. We have a rich network of distributors who either sell Soonr directly or white label our service. Many of the world's largest Telco's roll out our service.

What's next on your product roadmap?

Frid-Nielsen:  We have a very exciting roadmap ahead. There is a lot to do to make tablets and other mobile devices truly useful and productive for the mobile workforce. We are always thinking about usability. It's one thing to provide great functionality, it's a much bigger challenge to make it simple and easy to use. We spend a lot of time focusing on this. Finally, as we work with larger and larger businesses, we are adding more controls and admin features for the IT department.

Are you targeting a first VC round? If yes when and what will you use the
funds for? How much money is being sought?

Frid-Nielsen:  We raised approximately $30M at this point from a number of very supportive investors. We have spent this money building great technology, and have primarily worked with partners. While we continue to work with partners, you will see us also push the Soonr brand more.

What else would you like to add?

Frid-Nielsen:  Delivering a service like Soonr is an amazing experience. It provides insight into how business is conducted around the world today. I previously touched a bit on some of the disruptive forces at work, but the reality is that the state of the economy is pushing all kinds of businesses to think differently. For instance, many companies are now shutting down offices in order to work more effectively. People are working from home, at places like Starbucks or co-location facilities. We think a lot about this as we evolve our service, and ask ourselves questions like, "How can you be as productive at a Starbucks as in you are in the office?" On that note, we just launched a service with Ricoh that lets users print any file they have stored in the cloud to any of their printers around the world without installing any software or using cables.
The user can be on their way to the office to start the print job, and then pick it up when they arrive at whatever location the printer is.

Thank you for your time, Martin. For more information about the company please go to http://www.soonr.com.

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