Many of our users are district or regional managers. By definition of their job description, they are on the road a lot. In order to make our service useful to these users, we needed consider a mobile design that empowers them to get the most benefit of our service on a mobile device without any of the frill.

Designing for mobile is fun. It forces you to remove anything extraneous and hyper-focus on the core functionality required to do what a user needs to do on a mobile device. Thinking of our mobile application, customers have expressed the desire to simply view live video, search and view recorded video, and load recorded video from an alert notification. Pretty simple.

So, when you see our mobile application, my hope is that you appreciate the elegance in the clean, simple design.

Stay tuned…

Some customers came to us recently and said, “…you know, we love the new interface, but we would really love it if you could make it so that video player was bigger.”

You asked, we listened.

Today we are happy to announce the release of a newly redesigned player that increases the player viewing area by 75% on constrained, lower resolution monitors that are typical in the back-of-house operations of many of our customers.

This is all made possible by the way we operate at Envysion. Because the application our users utilize on a daily basis is hosted in cloud, in quickly responding to some customers’ requests, ALL customers benefit as we deploy new software upgrades several times a month. This morning when you login into the Envysion application on your browser, you have the upgrade. You, nor your IT team, do not have to usher through any software updates… they’re just there as we release new code. Easy as that. Easy as MVaaS.

Keep the feedback coming . We are eager to please and innovate with our customers.

Denver area cinema operators beware. Last night on the radio the deejays were doing a segment on creative ways to score a deal. One gentleman in his late 20s called in and revealed how he hasn’t paid for a full price, adult ticket in years. In a nutshell, he has been defrauding cinemas of revenue using a simple, yet very effective scheme.

Here’s the scheme as the caller explained it on the radio:

You go to a movie theater that has self service ticket kiosks and instead of buying a regular, adult ticket you buy a senior price ticket, often at half the price of an adult ticket. Then enjoy the movie at a major discount.

This scheme works for two reasons.

1. The caller has no moral issue buying a senior ticket. He admits it’s wrong but does it anyway.
2. The employee does not stop the fraud.

When the deejays pressed him for how he gets away with this, the caller says that he knows the minimum wage employee collecting tickets does not care that he has the wrong ticket type. The employee just wants to collect a paycheck and go home. Therefore, the caller said no one has ever stopped, or even questioned, him using a senior ticket

Fortunately, cinemas can limit loss due to this type of fraud with MVaaS. Leveraging Envysion’s powerful reporting capabilities, a cinema operator can easily identify all senior ticket sales at the kiosk register and review the video of those transactions to quickly determine if customers are taking advantage of the senior discount. (The cinema operator might also consider running a report for student tickets too.)

Once the extent of the fraud is determined, it is essential to communicate to employees the seriousness of this type of fraud. Short of limiting the types of tickets sold at kiosk registers, cinema operators must rely on their employees to catch and stop the fraud. Again cinema operators can leverage MVaaS to help ensure, employees are guarding against this type of fraud. If employees are catching and stopping the inappropriate tickets, then cinema operators can expect an certain number of ticket exchanges, i.e., if 10 customers inappropriately purchase a senior ticket in one day, then there should be 10 senior tickets exchanged for full price adult tickets during the same day. Using Envysion’s MVaaS a cinema operator is able to determine the number of senior tickets sold at the kiosk, visually identify any inappropriate sales and compare the number of inappropriate sales with the number of tickets exchanged – all within a matter of minutes.

I recently read that the iPad generates 400% more Wi-Fi traffic than the average wireless device such as the Android or iPhone.  In addition, there are nearly 9 million tablet PCs in use by SMBs today. ReadWriteWeb says, “…the iPad is poised to become the fourth largest consumer electronics category…” These are impressive facts and bold statements and what they indicate is a significant shift in the way we should think about computing. We’re not talking about cool apps to order plane tickets or trade stocks. We’re looking at bona fide computing on mobile devices that will rival-is rivaling-the computing performed on our desktops.

So what does this mean to the world of MVaaS? Prior to these statistics and statements, I have wondered what our MVaaS system would like: Perhaps a simplified dashboard or maybe a view into a single camera. But how useful would it be to view a video camera on a 4.5 inch by 2.3 inch screen on the 3G wireless network? We’re talking small and slow and more a novelty than providing a serious business function.

A small screen and slow network definitely do not lend themselves to the multi-camera power of the Envysion system (e.g., the user can view multiple cameras at a time in different variations). Clearly, having even two cameras up at a time is unreasonable on such a small screen at slow data speeds.

Enter the increased screen real estate of tablet PCs, such as the iPad, and the 4G network. Screen size is more than doubled and data rates increase two orders of magnitude. These new technologies will allow for realistic transfer rates and viewing of multiple cameras as well as running full-functioned applications.

Here’s a quick comparison of current and “quickly-becoming current” technologies that will change what it means to have MVaaS mobile (MVaaSm):

Current mobile computing environment:

Screen size (diagonal):

• The iPhone screen is about 3.5 inches
• The Android screen is 3.7 inches

Network bandwidth:

• 3G networks have data rates up to 2Mbps

Quickly-becoming current mobile computing environment:

Screen size (tablet PCs):

• iPad = 9.7 inches
• Android 2.2 = 10.1 inches

Network bandwidth:

• 4G networks can obtain data rates of 100Mbps (moving) to 1Gbps (stationary)

Moore’s law lives on. It will be exciting to see the tablet/iPad revolution develop.

One of the most exciting and powerful additions to our application is the introduction of tags. Both video clips and reports may now be tagged for use in augmented searching. Once a video clip or report is tagged, a user can easily search for all tagged clips or reports using our new search syntax. The Next Generation of Envysion also includes two new layouts. The first is a two-camera view that can be used to observe two different camera angles for a particular transaction. This is very helpful when examining possible foul play where multiple individuals may be involved. We have also added a 16-camera view for our customers with larger store footprints and multiple cameras. Additionally, our team has developed more robust search syntax, allowing for faster and more accurate searches.

Behind the scenes, we rebuilt the system from the ground up – streamlining the Envysion application with a new code base. By refactoring the application’s code (altering its internal structure without changing its external functionality), our application is more stable than ever before. This also means our development team can design, develop and release new features more quickly than in the past, taking full advantage of SaaS innovation cycles. Finally, the code refactoring will provide better and faster overall performance. Many customer locations will realize significantly increased performance, and those with lower network bandwidths will realize a small performance gain.

In the months to come, I look forward to hearing about how our revamped application has benefited your organization, whether it’s from reduced training time, increased efficiency or from enhanced views of your business in ways you had not previously thought possible.

At Envysion, our goal is to get our users to the video that matters to them quickly. Usually the important video is of potential fraud or theft. A key way we do this is through integrating video with point of sale (POS) and then creating custom reports to identify transaction types that can indicate fraud or theft. By integrating video with POS data, Envysion transforms information into knowledge – the data may give you a hunch that an employee is stealing from you, but Envysion quickly provides the proof. In a meeting with a multi-unit restaurant customer this week, a loss prevention professional shared a great example of how Envysion’s exception reports have uncovered one area highly susceptible to loss and helped to prevent this instance of fraud across the entire enterprise.

In the QSR/fast casual sector, many multi-unit chains incentive customers to buy more food by offering meals, which consist of an entrée, side and soda. The meal price is cheaper than buying each item separately; however, the restaurant has convinced the customer to buy three items when perhaps they only intended to buy one or two.

In this case Envysion helped the restaurant’s management team uncover an employee taking advantage of the meal incentive to subsidize her hourly wage. This particular employee realized that because of the way meals were set up in the POS system she could charge customers for a $7 meal ($4.50 entrée, $1.50 side and $1 drink), but only key the entrée and side into the register. Since the customer was expecting to pay $7, the employee knew she could short the register a dollar and pocket the $1 without anyone being the wiser. Over the course of a shift she was able to under ring 20 meals, and at five shifts a week, she was routinely defrauding the company $100 a week ($1 x 20 x 5).

Using Envysion’s video POS integration and robust exception reporting, the management team was able to build a report to detect meals without drinks and set a threshold for the excepted number of exceptions to allow for those customers who really do order a meal without a drink. When an employee surpasses the acceptable threshold, the regional manager receives an email alert and can immediately retrieve the video of the transaction. By reviewing the video of the transaction, the regional manager can easily validate whether or not the customer received a drink cup and take corrective action if necessary. Use of this report has drastically cut down on the number of meals sold without drinks, putting those extra dollars back into the register, for this restaurant.

A while back, I sat down with Envysion’s president and CEO, Matt Steinfort, and CTO, Robert Hagens, as well as David Gorman, former VP of loss prevention at Wal-Mart to talk about MVaaS. We ended up with several videos discussing  the various applications of MVaaS, how MVaaS is changing the way retailers are using video and the passion the Envysion has for MVaaS. So for the next few Fridays I’ll be posting video blogs, starting with “What is MVaaS?”

A recent survey by Axis examined retailers’ adoption/conversion to IP from analog cameras. One of the follow-on questions in the survey asked what is the biggest non-LP use of video surveillance. Respondents replied that people counting was the biggest non-LP use.

One of the allures of MVaaS is that it allows for easily expanding access to video, and the insights therein, across the entire organization. For the marketing organization, people counting is a great place to start, but there are many applications beyond.

To take it to the next level, you could, for example, gauge customers reactions to a given display ad. Do they see it? Do the react to it? What is their behavior telling you? Are there adjustments you could make to make the display more effective?

You could also review the effectiveness of a coupon promotion. Based on your people counting efforts, are more people in your store? Having integrated your POS data into your video system, is your promotion generating a higher conversion rate? What is the demographic profile of customers using the coupon? Think of the possibilities and all that can be done with this information; think of how much more effective you could be.

A tenet of marketing is timely feedback allowing you to make better, faster, and if necessary, course correcting decisions… as the cliché goes, “time is money.”

A recently reported skimming scheme at McDonald’s in which an employee made off with $50 thousand from drive-thru customers got me thinking about other types of drive-thru fraud that can cost restaurants big bucks. Could your restaurant be a victim to these frauds?

Employee meals/discounts at the drive-thru: A form of the sweatheart deal, this example of fraud can quickly drive up a restaurant owner’s costs of goods sold. In this instance, an employee working the drive-thru has his friends or family order at the drive-thru and applies an employee discount to the purchase. Since it’s often difficult to see the customer through the drive-thru window on video surveillance, it’s difficult to make a case against the employee. Fortunately, this costly issue can be easily corrected with a simple policy change. By only allowing employee meals/discounts to be given inside the restaurant, you can eliminate this type of fraudulent transaction at the drive-thru. With a MVaaS solution, you can easily validate that employees are following this policy by creating an alert for any employee discounts or meals at the drive-thru register.

Voids and comps at the drive-thru: While voids and comp fraud is not unique to the drive-thru, it is much easier for employees to accomplish at the drive-thru. Void and comp fraud occurs when an employee applies a bogus comp or void to a cash transaction so she can pocket the cash. This type of fraud becomes easier at the drive-thru because the customer cannot see the employee apply the fraudulent comp or void to the order. Restaurant operators should create exception reports and alerts for excessive voids or comps at all registers, but should consider creating lower thresholds for voids and promos at the drive-thru register to fight this particular type of fraud.

Conventional wisdom says not to go to the grocery store hungry or you’ll end up buying more than you had planned. At my local grocery store this philosophy does not hold true. While a part of a large chain of grocery stores, this particular location has a rather extensive selection of gourmet cheeses. We’re talking everything from Gouda and Brie to fancy French cheeses with unpronounceable names like Pont L’eveque. Every day the store employees put out a generous sampling of five or so cheeses. The general idea behind this practice is that people who try the cheese will feel obliged to buy some.

I know, by now you’re thinking what does this have to do with managed video?

Answer: In the past year and a half or so of shopping at this grocery store, I have never purchased a gourmet cheese. Now that’s not to say I don’t try every type of sample cheese when I’m shopping – in fact quite the opposite. I’ve come to view this as a free mid-day or after work snack.

I wonder how many other people like me there are who routinely eat the samples without buying any. Does the marketing team know how much this promotion is costing them? Let’s say I average $1.50 per visit in free cheese, and there are 10 people per day doing the same as me. That’s almost $5,500 a year in free samples! With the razor thin profit margins at grocery stores, can they afford this?

But how do you know how much a sample program is costing you (or if you’re actually making money) if you don’t measure it? With managed video the marketing team could perform virtual audits to see how many people try the samples and how many then put an item in their cart. They could see which customers are more likely to take the samples. Is it moms buying food for the entire family or hungry teenagers whose one item purchase won’t even cover the cost of their snacking? They could also measure if certain types of cheese get better results and fine tune the program to maximize purchases.

My guess is that the marketing team has a fairly poor understanding of how this program is working and an even worse ability to measure it. By giving organizations an unfiltered view into their operations, MVaaS enables marketers to better measure and understand promotions. Armed with better information, marketers can refine promotions to increase sales and profitability.