That’s a comment that is sure to get your attention, especially when it comes from your 12 year old son on a Sunday afternoon. This question, I needed to investigate. It turns out my son Ted was intent on hacking his PSP to give it new functionality that its creators (Sony) had not provided.

He showed me a YouTube video that explains how to crack open the standard PSP battery and then using a soldering iron, remove a pin from one of the chips on the attached circuit board. This apparently creates a “Pandora” battery which then lets you, eventually, be able to put custom firmware on the PSP (which lets you do new and cool things with your PSP).

After explaining to Ted that yes, I do have a soldering iron, but unfortunately, no, I have never “fixed” anything with it – I have only further destroyed any object I attempted to repair – I consented to some exploratory work.

The first step is to crack open the battery case. We did this in our garage together. I was holding a chisel and suggested to Ted (after 2 blows with a rubber hammer) to try “hitting it harder”. The following immediately ensued: a “zap” sound, a spark, and smoke. The battery got very warm and we decided to stop exploration.

What does this have with software or MVaaS? You know the drill…

Howard Schultz, the charismatic Chairman of Starbucks (NasdaqGS: SBUX), returned to the role of CEO in January 2008 (Starbucks Press Release January 7, 2008).

In subsequent communications, Mr. Schultz speaks of his “transformation agenda”.  What were their perceived problems?  The following five items are addressed in the press release, copied here verbatim:

·          Improving the current state of the U.S. business by refocusing on the customer experience in the stores, new products and store design elements, and new training and tools for the Company’s store partners to help them give customers a superior experience;

·          slowing the Company’s pace of U.S. store openings and closing a number of underperforming U.S. store locations, enabling Starbucks to renew its focus on its store-level unit economics;

·          re-igniting the emotional attachment with customers and restoring the connections customers have with Starbucks® coffee, brand, people and stores;

·          re-aligning Starbucks organization and streamlining the management to better support customer-focused initiatives and reallocating resources to key value drivers; and

·          accelerating expansion and increasing the profitability of Starbucks outside the U.S., including by redeploying a portion of the capital originally earmarked for U.S. store growth to the international business.

What stands out?  Namely Starbucks intention to refocus on improving the “customer experience”.

Could MVaaS be utilized to help drive the transformation?  You bet!  I’ll explain how in a subsequent post.

In the meantime, enjoy this comedic reference to Starbucks in the film Best in Show (2000).

Drew Mize, vice president of product management and marketing at The Pinnacle Corporation wrote a very interesting short piece on PCI Myths that is worth reading. Unfortunately, its only available via the print copy of the magazine for the Association for Convenience and Petroleum Retailing.

Two of the most salient points are first, that it’s the end-user owner/operator who is responsible for the fines and ongoing penalties if there is a PCI-related issue. This is the case even if your equipment vendor claims they are PCI compliant.

Second, here is a sure-fire way to determine if your equipment or service provider is really PCI aware. Ask them to recommend at least one certified PCI auditor. They should always be able to reference the auditor that performed their PCI audit. If not, “start asking the hard questions!”

Caveat Emptor

Have you given yesterday’s post some thought?  What possible connection am I making between this film and managed video?

Should parents have cameras installed in their children’s bedrooms, made viewable from their favorite restaurant?  Should a public view monitor be made available to all babysitters so they can monitor the well-being of children in real-time?

This is not what I had in mind…although perhaps there is a niche here to fill for some video provider…

The connection I was suggesting has to do with the essence of the babysitter’s situation.  The caller exploited the babysitter’s vulnerability – namely the fear of the unknown.  This is not an indictment of the babysitter, but rather a reality of the situation.  She did not know how the children were at that moment because she hadn’t recently checked.  The children were sleeping upstairs.  She assumed that they were safe.  Only when the caller called did she realize that she and the children were not safe. 

An interesting question arises – Had the caller not phoned to taunt her, how long would she have gone before realizing the danger?

Customers of traditional DVR and VHS video systems must deal with a similar reality.  As long as nothing happens, why worry about whether all of their video systems are operational?  Assume everything is fine, right?  It is only when something happens that they find themselves hoping that their systems were operational. 

Traditional CCTV customers have reported that as many as 50% of their traditional video systems were not fully functional when they did an audit – rendering their investment useless.

A key element of Managed Video as a Service is the ability to monitor the status of all cameras and recorders in real-time, with proactive system notifications alerting the customers of any issues.  When the proverbial caller calls, customers of MVaaS know in advance that their systems are working.  This is something that Jill Johnson could have used.

A typical restaurant is staffed 95 hours per week. The countless weeks I was in my restaurant each of those hours certainly proved out in the P&L. Customers had an extraordinary experience, labor was kept in check, mistakes were at a minimum, waste was non-existent and gross profit was above average. However, these hours are not sustainable. If I stepped away, would the P&L prove sustainable?

I will focus several subsequent posts on how I reduced “employee theft” in my restaurant using managed video. Let’s be very clear – I’m not talking about a premeditated theft of $20 out of the register. Instead, I am referring to a more dangerous and habitual operational problem that bleeds the top line, bloats food and labor costs and ultimately erodes gross profit to unacceptable levels.

In the 1979 version of When a Stranger Calls, babysitter Jill Johnson (played to perfection by Carol Kane) is repeatedly called by a person whom she does not know. The caller, in a calm and deliberate manner, continues to ask her “Have you checked the children?” Obviously concerned by the harassment, Jill Johnson calls the police for help. Who wouldn’t?

For those of you who have not seen the film, you may view the climax of the scene below. Great seventies film-making!

What you may not know is where this post is heading. What does this have to do with Managed Video? Any guesses?

When a Stranger Calls

A key component of managed video is that it must work like it’s just “built-in” to your network.

Step by step, access to video, video acquisition, storage and management will become components of “the network”.

The form factors that these components will take will vary.  They may be separate hardware devices, or expansion cards for an existing devices or software added to some device.  But the end result is that these components will become increasingly integrated as part of “the network infrastructure”, just as email, websites, fileservers, routers and switches are all part of the network infrastructure.
Why?  To maximize the effectiveness of video and minimize the overhead.

Effectiveness is massively improved when the video can be linked to data.  This data resides on other systems in the network, but unless they are linked together, value is lost.  Effectiveness is also significantly improved when access to the video when many people can view the video.  Outside of internal security, there is external security, such as first responders.  Then there’s operations, marketing, maintenance, management, Human resources and the list goes on.  All of these people are on the network now and could take advantage of the appropriate, authorized access to video.

Even at a medium sized business thousands of components may be involved in a video system.  Installation and operation of these must be as plug and play as possible.  Users with basic computer skills need to be able to jump in and find what they are looking for quickly.  Component failures must be rare, easily detected and remedied.

By integrating components into the network infrastructure one can apply established methods for remotely operating, monitoring, repairing and controlling access to massive, distributed video systems.

If your video system isn’t linked to “real” information, it is providing only a mere fraction of the value it could be.

The future of video surveillance lies in how to manage all the data being collected and turn it into something useful. Our ability to collect ever more massive amounts of data is growing at a rapid pace. Video management systems are part of the reason we can more easily collect such data.

However, most surveillance video is not extremely valuable until it is accompanied by some kind of information that makes that video searchable. In fact, without information to give context to the video, it is not valuable at all. That information might come from a person sitting in front of a video who knows something about what is going on or it might come from a door access control system or a point of sale system. Given the sea of video out there, one must have some help from automated data systems.
This is the premise of Steve Hunt’s PSIM acronym which he talks about at his Security Dreamer blog.

I think Steve would agree that the value of turning video data into “information” goes well beyond Physical Security and is especially pertinent to the broader category of business intelligence. When it comes to business applications, Steve points out that security is really not the point; rather the ability to improve one’s business is a huge factor driving growth in video.

I spoke with Paul Bodell from IQeye recently.  Paul wrote an interesting article calling for an industry video quality standard in Video Technology & Applications of SDM Magazine.

Explaining video quality to customers who are non-technical is difficult.  How can you tell a customer what level of quality to expect from a particular installation?  IQEye’s approach has a lot of merit.  Paul is promoting creation of a industry standard for a quality level that is high enough detail to identify a face.  Paul calls this a “forensic” level of detail.  The technical spec to achieve this is “40 pixels per foot” for this forensic level of detail.  Take a quick look at this proposed specification.

To give a real world example, a customer wants to identify the face of a customer at a cash register and the denomination of bills going in and out of the register.   A cost effective to do way to do this is with one analog camera at 640×480 resolution.  With this, one can cover the register and counter next to it, covering the transaction with a customer and have a good chance of being able to identify the bills and customer faces.

Here’s how came up with that:  A 640×480 image is 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels tall.  640 pixels / 40 pixels-per-foot  = 16 feet.  So this camera can cover a 16 foot wide field of view and retain a forensic level of detail.  The highest end analog cameras support up to 704×576 resolution, giving a slight boost.

Some scenarios don’t require a forensic level of detail to be useful.  For example, the manager of a retail store can recognize her own employees with less than the forensic level of detail.  A single analog camera might cover a restaurant dining area that’s 32 feet across.

If one needs to be able to identify license plates across 8 parking spaces, that’s about a 64 foot wide field of view.  In this scenario, single multi-megapixel IP camera may present a cost competitive option compared to the installation of 4-5 analog cameras.