The place to learn about and discuss Managed Video as a Service
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.
Image by FadderUri via FlickrIn a recent study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), venture capitalists invested over $7.4 billion in the second quarter. This is on par with the $7.5 billion invested during the first quarter, and continues a general and steady upward trend since 2002.
At the intersection of video, data, time and place lies all the value to be gleaned from video.
If you’ve got data which includes a timestamp and a location, wouldn’t it be great if you could just paste a link to the video? What if some software could automatically do it for you?
If we had a simple web based standard for that, interfacing between any application and video could be as easy as pasting a link to YouTube.
The great part about this is that this is actually a pretty easy technical problem to solve. But the problem is there are so many ways to do and and not everyone does it the same way. This is going to change, and soon.
Be it video analytics, data analytics, intelligence based on the available data is paramount to making productive use of video. The most effective Managed Video service will “hook into” best of breed intelligence services.
Managed Video Systems should strive to be great at managing video and making it easy to link that video with data. But which data is important to you? This is a very complicated question and is wildly different depending on who is looking at the video and the application. For example, retail fraud prevention, physical security and manufacturing safety all require very different business intelligence solutions which are very specific to the problems they are trying to solve.
At a high level I can think of two very good ways to accomplish linking video and data.
1. Supply data links into the video application with timestamps of when the events are occurring.
2. Link video capabilities into data analytics applications.
Both allow users to see video associated with data and both allow an expert system to produce the data. Using web based systems for both the video and data analytics ought to make it less difficult to link them together compared with traditional computer applications running on individual computers.
To move from “less difficult” to “somewhat easy” some very simple standards for how to link to video need to put into place. This is an area ripe for innovators in Managed Video Services. The great thing is we already have all the tools we need to make this possible over the web. In my next post I’ll provide a little detail the number one tool we have available to make this possible.
I’m not an expert in law enforcement or military intelligence, but I have heard that the biggest issues making it difficult to share information are both cultural and organizational. Many of those organizations are designed not to share information. Protecting information, especially in those environments is often part of what makes the information valuable.
However, when these groups do WANT to share information it is often very difficult, for the systems have followed the policies of the organizations. They are designed to prevent information sharing. Common tools and methods for secure sharing of information would be valuable to help solve this part of the problem. A lot of money is being spent to tackle this problem, such as the $20B+ Networx Universal contract from the GSA of which recently about $1B was awarded to interconnect the the various units of the Department of Homeland Security.
It’s this secure sharing that is so much more difficult than the social network web sites of today are building. In MVaaS, you want to share only with whom you choose. As the concept of MVaaS matures secure sharing will become one of the key values that MVaaS delivers.
Rob Hagens predicts that those standards are more likely to arrive out of an open, organic, open software that works approach rather than a centralized, 100lb standards documentation approach. In this way the process of creating defacto standards this way mimics the information sharing goal. What a great way to get where you are going!
Sony, Bosch and Axis have recently agreed to cooperate in forming a new, open forum aimed at developing standards for networked video. Here’s a quote:
The main goal of this new standard is to facilitate the integration of various brands of network video equipment and to help manufacturers, software developers and independent software vendors ensure product interoperability.
This is a great thing and could really advance MVaaS. In fact, given the players involved, it is an indicator that a more healthy ecosystem of service providers, equipment providers and resellers and installers will be possible. The Internet is proof that a model that which allows a low barrier of entry and rapid innovation can generate a lot of value.
Increased interoperability between the various players in the industry will allow each player to increase their core value with less burden of having their focus split across the myriad of functions needed to bring a plug-and-play solution to the end customer. This focus will foster increased competition and innovation.
Axis, Bosch and Sony are waiting until October 2008 to announce their plans, so it remains to be seen exactly what they will come up with. I am impressed with Axis and their open model, but Sony and Bosch have a business built on being closed and non-interoperable.
MySpace’s “Data Availability” Project might make for an interesting model to approach processing data captured from today’s business systems.
Granted, social apps are ALL about sharing with only minimal consideration for control and privacy of data. However, imagine if there were de-facto standard ways of handling managed video. Software providers, service providers and manufacturers could much more easily work together. I suspect it would be useful and valuable if the following product and service providers could connect to each others services over the Internet:
I’m sure there are many others.
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.
