Fall is my favorite time of year; the leaves are changing, it’s cooling down and most importantly it’s football season.  For the past few years I’ve anticipated the start of the season with much more enthusiasm.  The reason for this new found enthusiasm has been my involvement in a fantasy football league.  Fantasy football, takes something that I already have a passion for and makes it even more exciting by giving me a reason to be involved in several games in order to track my team’s performance.  It also gives me the opportunity to put on my GM hat and make decisions that can help or hinder my team’s performance. 

Effectively managing a team requires time, effort and an understanding of information (e.g. trades, injuries, trends) that is crucial to a successful season.   A GM has a lot of information to dissect each week in order to give their team the best chance to win.   The first couple of seasons I found it difficult to keep up with all of the trades, added/dropped players, injuries and the progress of free agents, which one can add to their team if someone on their team has a bye week or isn’t performing.  Finally, I activated a feature on the Fantasy Football web site that I had never used before, “Alerts”.  The second that I enabled this setting I became a much better GM and could make decisions that would affect the outcome of the game days in advance.  The alerting function of this website takes information that is being gathered about each NFL player and proactively alerts (sends and email) each GM based upon criteria they have designated as important.  A GM can be alerted to set their line up, player updates, league trades, and scores.  This information can be vital to the planning of your starting lineup each week and if acted upon can give your team a competitive advantage.

MVaaS acts in much the same way as the Fantasy Football website.  Through the integration of software based business applications e.g. POS systems, access control, temperature sensors etc. an owner or manager can set up reports with specific business rules, that if broken, can generate an alert that proactively prompts a user to log in and review video from a specific location.  For example if I have an MVaaS solution integrated with my POS system I can define a rule that if a site has more than ten voids in a day I want to be alerted.  This type of capability can come in very handy when making tough decision about your Fantasy Football team, and more importantly your business.  I find it to be a great asset to be able to make decisions based upon up to date information.

Congratulations to Timesight who recently received $4.5M in new funding.   It looks like they’ve recently launched a Video storage appliance which implements “Video Lifecycle Management (VLM)”.

It seems that VLM boils down to reducing the frame rate and resolution of stored video images over time.  Ie: the older a video is, the lower the quality.  The idea of course being that older video is less likely to contain valuable information and therefore can be compressed more and more as it gets older and older.

This is a very reasonable thing to do and is a valuable cost reduction.  In fact, I go as far to say that long term storage of large number of Megapixel video feeds is not feasible from a cost perspective in most use cases without video management like this.  Mega-pixel cameras are a particularly good use case for this technology becaues they have a lot of room for reducing quality while still retaining a usable image.  I wouldn’t be suprised if this method becomes industry standard best practice for storing megapixel resolution video surveillance.

Another thing that stands out to me about Timesight’s storage appliance is that this VLM process is something that  traditional network based storage systems (Network Appliance, etc…) don’t do.

I also found it interesting that the CEO of Timesight, Charles Foley, used to run Tacit networks which was bought by Packeteer (now owned by BlueCoat), a notable and successful network/telecom equipment company.

Good luck Timesight!

Since the announcement of Conoco’s decision to locate its alternative energy HQ to Louisville Colorado, both start-up and veteran players in this space have been scrambling to occupy space in the surrounding business parks along the 36 corridor. While clean energy companies are landing the big investments, the top deals remain very diverse, including Lijit Networks out of Boulder with $7.1M.

According to the Rocky Mountain News, venture funding was up 203% compared to the 2nd quarter and up 55% compared to the same period last year. 2008 stands to be the best year since 2001.

Kudos to these entrepreneurs and capitalists as they continue to help drive our economy’s future.

I spent the entire day today at one of Colorado’s largest gatherings of entrepreneurs and technology companies, CSIA’s DemoGALA.  We were there to demonstrate our service having been selected as one of Colorado’s 20 most innovative companies.  The theme of the event this year was Deconstruction - Reconstruction and the topics focused on how innovative startup companies often disrupt existing industries and cause a chain of events that ends up reshaping how markets are served.

We were selected for this event (having earlier this year won CSIA’s Most Innovative Technology Product award) because our efforts to create the MVaaS space are beginning to disrupt the traditional video surveillance world.  It was a great chance to meet other leading entrepreneurs in Colorado, like Jon Nordmark, the co-founder of eBags.  In case you haven’t used them (my wife has bought several laptop bags from them) they are one of the few early e-tailers that made it successfully through the bubble. I was also able to re-connect with Antoine Toffa, the founder of Trip.com (became Orbitz in 2000) and now the CEO of VideoBloom a really cool online video advertising and distribution company.

It was a great event from a networking standpoint, but was certainly not one that was expected to produce any direct customer activity as the audience was full of investors, entreprenuers and a variety of other technology companies.  The good news is that even at an event such as this you can find great opportunities when you have a service that people can easily grasp and find value in.  The best example of this was a guy from a data services company that happened by the booth.  One of our brand new sales people that had joined us at the event just as an opportunity to practice his pitch showed the guy the service and he was really impressed.  Turns out the guys brother is the regional director of loss prevention at a major national retailer.  Within 30 minutes of the demonstration, the guy had called his brother who then had reached out to our salesperson to set up a face to face meeting to get an introduction to our service.

All in all a great day.

We’ve often wrote about how sharing video and data can be a powerful tool, especially when that information can be trusted and is easy to get at.

Another instance of using information sharing over the Internet is a work in progress in the IETF.  Authored by some folks at Verisign and Entrust, the IETF Internet Draft “Sharing Transaction Fraud Data” proposes a way to share intelligence about fraud incidents over the Internet.

Efforts like this should lead to easier access of sensitive information sharing across organizations .  It’s also interesting because it’s perhaps an indication of increased willingness for organizations to share information in light of procedural, trust and legal considerations that will have to be overcome to make such sharing possible.

John Honovich rated managed video as one of the top 3 emerging technologies in Video Surveillance for 2008.  We here at Envysion are flattered to be mentioned as the segment leader!

I think John has it right that it’s going to take several years before managed video is as big as the general IP video market is today.  J. C. R. Licklider wrote back in 1965: “A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years…”.  Bill Gates said something similar in the 90’s.  It’s not uncommon for even only incrementally new technologies to take 3-5 years to reach critical mass.

The speed of market acceptance and adoption of managed video will also take time.  Technology and bandwidth are not barriers, but only with the right mix of centralized and distributed software, storage and video streaming.  Envysion is doing it today.

However, operating a managed video system at scales of over a millon cameras is something that’s going to take considerable “know-how” that only comes from having “been there and done that” over years of learning.

Managed video may be plug-and-play at the edge, but scaling up all the systems necessary to keeping everything running well together is not plug-and-play.  Fortunately we’ve accomplished similar feats in the telecom space building the backbones of the Internet and voice over IP systems.

In 5 or 10 years, a million cameras will feel like just the start.  It’s crystal clear to me that there is enormous growth potential for managed video.

There are more ways than ever to communicate using video.  Of course, there is video conferencing, either via a special phone device like a Polycom or software on your computer like Skype.

But whole new segments of video communication have emerged in the last 3-5 years that most of us probably never thought would happen.  YouTube is increasingly being used as a visual collaboration tool and it isn’t only for entertainment, but also increasingly for business.  There are ton’s of informational videos, how to and product demos out there.  Now, take this to the next level.

There is a concept called Visual Networking in which anyone can immediately talk, see and share content with a few people or thousands of colleagues or friends”.  An interesting startup company called Bada Networks (formerly Amity Systems) is building technology just for this purpose.

Here’s a good article in network world about Bada.

When I worked in the cable industry, I especially enjoyed the perk of free cable. We’re talking the works - all of the movie channels and digital channels - not just basic cable. The logic behind giving cable company employees free cable was that we could fully experience what our customers experienced. For example, we could be the first to report outages, or even offer suggestions for improving the customer experience. In reality, it was the customer service representatives who took customer feedback (usually in the form of complaints), and, unless it was a forward-thinking cable company, customer feedback rarely turned into service improvements.

It’s quite the opposite at Envysion. I have the pleasure of sitting amidst our Sales team, and I often hear sales people on the phone with customers. If a customer is experiencing a problem with cameras or reports, the salesperson simply logs onto the application so they can see exactly what the customer is looking at. Not only can the salesperson help diagnose problems, but they can also discuss improvements to the service or the application. Because this is Envysion, and because our service is built upon the Managed Video as a Service platform, customer feedback doesn’t stop there. The feedback triggers an internal conversation with the development team, and sometimes the development team gets on the phone with the customer to fully understand their input. Thus, conversations with our customers often catalyze a feature enhancement or refinement of the application. Through the MVaaS platform, the new or upgraded feature can be quickly incorporated into the application and seamlessly pushed to all of our customers, not just the customer who initiated the idea.

At Envysion, we can literally see what our customers are saying, and our customers see the results of our conversations.

Is it a coincidence that Socialthing!,  a 2007 TechStars company, won an IQ Award for innovation last week, and just announced on Friday that AOL is buying them?

It’s cool to see the interplay between an innovative idea, an organization like TechStars that can spot a promising concept, smart investors, insightful judges, and a deep-pocketed buyer. It’s just one aspect of working in the start up world that gets the adrenaline going!

I continue to focus on how to more simply communicate what it is that we do and what it is that MVaaS solutions provide.

Tonight was another opportunity to experiment for me as I was at an awards ceremony mingling with the leading technology companies in the Boulder/Denver corridor at the Boulder County Business Reports’ Innovation Quotient (IQ) Awards.  We were up for the most innovative award in the Business Services category.  The reason that this was a great chance to experiment for me was the diversity of the group that was at the event.  There were companies there that provide waste management services, a ton of social media internet companies, and even a company that “has created and patented a process for manufacturing agglutinate, a material that makes up 40 percent of the moon’s surface”.  How cool is that?

I had a group of highly charged and diverse entreprenuers at my disposal all of whom were politely asking what every person that they met did as we awaited the actual awards ceremony. None of them had any idea about the state of the video surveillance market and what the challenges are and why one solution would be better than others. I abandoned any use of the term MVaaS, I tried to use only language that the average person (although these people were certainly more technical than the average bear) would understand. I would occasionally sprinkle in the Software as a Service buzzword as most of them got that, although probably had no idea how it related to video in this context and why that is a big deal.

When I started the evening and there weren’t as many folks (they had a pre-event for award nominees) I tended to give what I call the extended elevator pitch. It is the 2 minute description of our business that I usually give after I try my one sentence version to provide more context if they are either interested or didn’t get it at first. As the night went on and the conversations increased in frequency and shortened in length I reverted to the single sentence version.

I probably used more than one variation of this, but it usually went something like “we let businesses with multiple locations easily and remotely access live and recorded video of their sites so they can understand what’s happening and run their businesses better without crushing their IT infrastructure or people” I know that I’ve written about this on more than one occasion, but it is still something that I keep thinking I could do a better job on. I want a short, punchy description that both communicates what we do to pretty much anyone and is clear enough about why we are different that we don’t sound just like every other video company to people that know the video segment. Not sure I got there tonight but I’m getting closer.

The one thing I can say is that the bar has definitely been raised based on one of the elevator pitches I heard at the ceremony. No it wasn’t the “fake plastic moon dust” guys (that is my elevator pitch for them, so they don’t get credit for it) The winner in simplest elevator pitch goes to Tensegrity Prosthetics. Their official blurb (probably akin to my second level elevator pitch) is “[We make] a prosthetic foot that closely matches the function of the human foot and ankle, designed to relieve an amputee’s metabolic stress associated with most other foot prosthetics, allowing them to be more efficient and subsequently more energetic.” Not just a great product (they won the Medical Innovations Category award) but a very well articulated product description. It communicates what it is, how it is different from the competition, and how it benefits the customer. Good stuff. Even better was how the CEO boiled their company down - “Better fake feet”. While he said it rather tongue in cheek. It pretty much communicates exactly what they are all about. 3 words. That will be hard to top. I’ll have to keep working on it…

By the way, Envysion won our category and received an IQ award for most innovative business service. Congrats to the whole Envysion team on another recognitition of the power of our MVaaS service.