If there’s one thing I need in the office, it’s headphones. Headphones piping music straight to my cerebral cortex. One reason is because it can get pretty noisy and when you’re heads down on a problem, trying to tune out a conversation can get distracting. Having said that, I wear headphones even when I’m working from home and it’s dead quiet.. so perhaps that’s just what I tell my boss and I’m really just a slacker.

Sometime in 2008, I discovered a music service that you may already know about called Pandora. It’s a free service and they have a really nice iPhone client, which is key. The beauty of Pandora is that based on your preferences the system plays music it thinks you’ll enjoy.. and it’s a beautiful thing. I’ve been turned on to a ton of new music using the service. To me, it’s magic.  Some people have speculated that somewhere down the road this kind of application know-how will lead to this:

Image via Wikipedia.

Or this:

Image via Wikipedia.

Personally, I think it’ll be more like this:

Image via Wikipedia.

We know it’s not all magic, that there are humans categorizing and tagging Artists/Albums/Songs all day long, that there’s metadata ‘the system’ uses to make recommendations.

Having ‘the system’ make recomendations to you based preferences is something that makes a lot of sense. Using MVaaS and getting a point of sale feed is a great way to do it because it doesn’t involve humans tagging files. You’ve got your POS terminals feeding ‘the system’ metadata about your video.  This is all you need to get started alerting your organization to things you might like to know about.

If you’re a retail operator selling a new widget wouldn’t it be cool to know when you’ve sold X number of widgets? Even better, wouldn’t it be cool to see the video so you know who’s buying what?  On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps you’d also like to be notified when a store executes a particular number of transaction voids.. oh, and here’s the video..  and hey, it’s the same guy and there’s some slight of hand going on. Envysion’s reporting and alerting is something we’ve been hard at work on and we think you’re going to like it. Find some interesting video you want to share? Check out our groups. I’ll get to that in another post.. down the road.

In the mean time, we’ll leave busting the bad guys to the humans.