The Canberra Times

By Kanchan Dutt
Business Reporter

Two innovative Canberra companies have won more than $400,000 in Federal Government funding.

Phillip based TASKey landed a $336,095 AusIndustry grant to market software allowing people within different organisations to work securely over the web with each other.

The second ACT recipient was Auraya, of Bruce, whose grant of $64,000 will promote a service to verify the identity of people ringing secure call centres or using the internet for financial transactions.

TASKey managing director Neil Miller said the latest funding boost and an earlier AusIndustry grant enabled the company to shave years off the time taken to get the software to market.

“The man justification for giving this grant is AusIndustry is looking to allow you to have the ability to speed up development and release the product to market before anyone else,” he said. “Now we can do this in the middle of this year whereas it would have been years down the track without the money.”

TASKey already has software on the market allowing those within the same organisation to work together securely over the internet, but its latest product aims to do the some for people across different companies and agencies.

Announcing the grants yesterday, Australian Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said the earlier version of the software was already being used by the Department of Defence.

The money awarded to Auraya was announced user the Commercialising Emerging Technologies program.

Clive Summerfield found the company in November, while he was applying for the funding, following on from his work with speech recognition software.

“For internet security, we use a microphone plugged into the computer to confirm the identity of the person,” he said. “You can use it to verbally sign credit card transactions over the internet, massively useful for bands, and there are patented safeguards within the software to ensure the voice is not just a recording.  “One of the biggest problems banks and companies have is how to tell that the credit card being used is not stolen, my daughter uses my card online all the time and the first I find out is when the bill comes through.” Dr Summerfield said the money would be used to develop business plans and commercialise the technology.