A while back one of our board members recognized that we needed to focus some efforts on defining the type of culture we wanted at Envysion. Our CEO tasked me with leading the efforts and gave as one of my first tasks the formation of a cultural committee that would be responsible for defining and instilling this culture within the organization. Thus the Envysion Culture Club was born.

We’ve done some fun things over the last few months and I’m remiss in not posting about them. But that will change and as a step in the direction of posting more frequently about the Cutlure Club’s activities I wanted to post about our recent Envysion pumpkin carving contest.

The Culture Club wanted to do something fun that involved the families of our employees and we settled on a pumpkin carving contest where employees would bring their kids and help them carve some really cool pumpkins. We’d give prizes for the best pumpkins and have cookies and punch for the kids.

We had a terrific turn out and some really fantastic pumpkins. So many, in fact, that we had to invent 2 categories for prizes. I’ll be posting a photo album containing all the photos we took but for now I wanted to show the winner of the traditional carved pumpkin Mr. Will McDonald son of Joey McDonald our senior systems engineer. Will’s pumpkin was scary and traditional.

Will McDonald

Thanks to Bridget Hamilton - our office manager and Culture Club member - who helped us get all of the carving supplies we had some pumpkin adornments of the Mr. Potato Head ilk. As a result of the great designs resulting from these adornments we had to create an additional category and awarded the prize to Chase Jensen son of Chris Jensen one of our sales folks.

Chase Jensen

As you can see there were a lot of really great designs.

Just a few of the contestants

And folks had a great time gutting and carving the pumpkins.

Gutting and carving

Even our CEO Matt Steinfort got into the act with his kids.

Matt Steinfort and kids

Perhaps the best scary face of the afternoon though came from our VP of Operations Bill Steinfort.

scarygrandpabill

All in all it was a grand time and all the kids really enjoyed themselves - even us grown up ones.

I write a post about standards and interoperability from time to time, and I’m afraid its time again. To wit; one of our customers has asked for us to incorporate a temperature sensor into our application. Their idea is that they put this sensor into their freezer/refrigerator and if the inside starts to warm up, they will get an alarm from us. In addition, they can view video correlated to that event as well.

So, how do you connect a temperature sensor to a DVR? The brute force method, which this CTO was considering, involves a temperature sensor that delivers an analog voltage output, which is then connected to an Analog to Digitial converter (either inboard or outboard of the DVR), which is then polled at frequent intervals. This data would then be fed into the Envysion data collection system.

Enter now Darren Loher and Jeff Gannon (both frequent contributors to this blog) who suggested the Sensorhawk-2. This nifty little device integrates with multiple sensors and makes that data available over a network. The data it collects can be retrieved via a number of methods including SNMP and syslog (both standard protocols for information exchange).

How do you integrate this into a DVR? Well, since our systems already uses both SNMP and syslog, integration is a snap!

What’s the point? Open standards and interoperability win again!

Just imagine where our industry would be if cameras and recording units and control software all interoperated as easily! Traditional players in this industry take note!

As Arthur C. Clarke once said was the best advice given by Douglas Adams, I too think it’s the best advice software as a service companies should give themselves. The chart below is one version of the fundamental reason why.

More people are connecting to the Internet today than in past years. The chart below is from internetworldstats.com.

What does this mean? There are more people every day with the ability to leverage the Internet to accomplish their business. How does the current economic crisis leverage this situation?

I read an article in the Denver Post this weekend that suggested air travel will decrease due to the economic crisis. (Personally, I hope that happens on Thanksgiving weekend, when I have to travel this year). Lets consider how this effects a business. Will they cancel trips previously planned to discuss operating the business? Yes. Will they find another way to have that meeting, if it is necessary? Absolutely. How will they have the meeting? I’ll bet using technology related to the Internet.

Clearly, this is a time to be austere with expenses. But, business will continue. People will continue to need to communicate and interact and the Internet will be the tool of choice.

One of our customers had over 600 people log in to use our service, each using it many times per week, over this past month. Our service allows them to avoid costs (including travel). Do you think this usage is going to go up or down in the coming quarter? Do you think other companies are interested in the same opportunity to cut their costs, you betcha!

What does this mean for a managed video as a service company? Focus on your core services and provide reliable quality product that delivers a sustainable value for the customer. The rest will take care of itself.

I had a post in late August on the importance of Efficient Capital.  Written before the current banking/credit/stock market/recession/etc. crisis, the focus was on the sensibility of MVaaS for store operators.

Well, I noticed the appearance of the term “capital efficiency” today on the blogosphere.  I noticed it first on Feld Thoughts, and it was linked and commented from another post on A VC.  Both posts are good, and written from the VC and Start-up perspectives.  As with many concepts in economics, the principles are universal.

It’s interesting that it often takes a crisis for many of us to focus on capital efficiency.  Companies that have had the discipline to do so everyday should be well positioned in today’s market environment.

I ran across an interesting file sharing site whalemail.com. The intent of this site is to make it feasible to share large files via email. The way the system works is that you use your browser to upload a file to the site and then type in a list of email addresses. The site then sends an email to each recipient with a link to the file that was uploaded.

Of course, files are not really being shared via email, rather the site facilitates the sharing of links to files.

What are the benefits of using a site like this to share video? Simple: video files are big. In fact, they are too big to fit in a typical email message. As such, the obvious way of sharing video (as an attachment), just isn’t practical. These link-sharing sites may be an alternative work-around for a traditional DVR user to share video files.

Why save video into the network at all? There are several benefits. First and foremost, video that is stored in the network can be made available to users through a high performance Internet pipe. Typically a network storage site has significant Internet bandwidth and connectivity. What this means is that the video will stream or download faster and more reliably.

There is a significant security problem with using this style of sharing. Stay tuned tomorrow for more details.

A September 25 article in Nation’s Restaurant News by Alan Liddle touts a new SaaS service from MenuCalc that can be used to compute nutritional analysis of menu items. With an increasingly health conscious nation, nutritional analysis is rapidly moving to be a critical part of many restaurants. According to Dawn Saxton, co-founder and vice president of product development for the twenty-two unit Specialty’s Café & Bakery in San Francisco, “the beauty” of MenuCalc is that “it is Web-based and hosted”, meaning it is “software I don’t have to load” and “something I don’t have to own.”

It will be interesting to see how SaaS continues to infiltrate all aspects of a restaurant’s IT portfolio.

Whether it’s video for loss prevention or nutritional analysis for menu items, SaaS proves its value again and again.

It is good to see more SaaS activity in the video market.  I was at a function this evening hosted by one of the leading VC and start-up focused banks, Silicon Valley Bank.  In addition to having a nice time drinking wine and eating some nice appetizers, I was able to re-connect with another local entrepreneur in the video world, Bryan Bouldin.  Bryan runs an early stage video company that is focused on facial recognition and the integration with criminal databases as a tool in the fight against organized retail crime.  The company is called Riverview Systems if you want to check it out (although their website is currently under construction).

The cool thing about re-connecting with Bryan was how he described his company.  When I first met Bryan about a year ago they were implementing a very hardware intensive model that would require a retailer to run servers on premise to house a database of facial images and their application.  A year later they have augmented their model with a SaaS based solution that eliminates the in-store investment and completely changes their pricing dynamic making it much more affordable for the retailer.

When I introduced Bryan to another colleague of mine, and my colleague inquired as to what Bryan did he replied “I run a SaaS company”  I have expected to see a lot more start-ups and incumbents entering the Managed Video as a Service market.  It is good to see it happening.

Good luck Bryan!

I was talking with my kids about the various customer trials we are conducting at Envysion, and I mentioned a certain chain that sells lots of video games. My son immediately jumped on the topic with an interesting marketing idea.

Like many others, it took Ted about 6 months of diligent calling, a few 6 am trips to the mall, and plenty of frustration to finally score a Wii. Even 18 months after their launch, people have complained they are hard to find. Now that’s one popular game system!

So, back to the idea, he reasoned it would be pretty neat if this not-to-be-mentioned-by-name store chain would make video of deliveries and stock rooms available on the Internet. Then, when its 2 days before a launch, and he calls to ask if the PSP 4 or xbox 720 is there yet, he can look at the video and say “I just saw you unload 10 of them from the truck!” … or “I can see 10 of them on the shelf”.

Now that would be some interesting inventory management!

Chances are, you’ve eaten a stack of pancakes at IHOP at least once in the last 50 years. This year, IHOP celebrates the opening of its first restaurant 50 years ago in Toluca Lake, California. Until a marketing program introduced the acronym “IHOP” in 1973, the iconic blue-roofed structures were known by the longer name “International House of Pancakes.”  The “international” moniker describes the menu, which originally featured pancakes from around the world, in addition to standard American flapjacks. With the name change came the change in the structures, and the last A-frame restaurant was built in 1979.

Source: www.ihop.com

Today, IHOP has more than 1,300 restaurants in the US. To grow and sustain leadership in a crowded market is no easy feat, so congratulations to IHOP for achieving this milestone. Pancakes, anyone?

As I mentioned last Saturday in a post, I spent the first part of this week in Atlanta at ASIS - one of the two really large security shows each year, the other being the ISC shows (there are two of them, East and West).  The thing that I like about the ASIS conference is that it tends to have a lot more end users there whereas ISC tends to be a show more attended by integrators than real end customers.

I’ll give a full account of my trip in tomorrow’s post, but I thought I’d give a quick example of another MVaaS differentiator that was highlighted in one of my conversations with a customer prospect of ours.  The customer has ~1,500 locations, all corporate owned and managed.  The nature of their business (they are in retail) is that they do only a handful of transactions in a day (average is 10-15 per store per day).  I was talking to one of their regional directors of loss prevention about their biggest pain points and discovered that the single most important issue that this person was dealing with was false contracts.  The problem that they had was that some portion of the 15 transactions per day were complete fiction, either done by an employee or someone with familiarity with how this company does business.  The challenge that the LP director faced was that they were not usually able to identify these suspected false transactions until several months after the event occurred.  At that point there was almost no chance that they could use video to help them in any way in the investigation as they only keep 30-45 days of video on their traditional DVRs.

Here’s where an MVaaS solution can help in ways that a traditional DVR solution can’t.  Given the hosted nature of an MVaaS solution, customers can save their video not just to a file on their laptop, but they can also save video into a secure data center where it will persist as long as they want it to.  It can be more easily shared with lots of people; it can be categorized, annotated and tracked in a case management context; and it can be archived for future investigative purposes.  All of this can be done without any need for the company’s IT group to do anything - no need to set up and manage central storage capabilities, no need to touch any individual DVR, no need to worry about file management or anything related to the hundreds or thousands of video clips that a company may be interested in centrally archiving and sharing over the course of the year.

In the case of this customer, the application of this capability is pretty straight-forward.  Customer only has 15 transactions a day, which is really not that many in the retail world.  They can set up a rule once that is immediately applied to all of their 1,500 locations where the 5 minutes associated with every single transaction is automatically stored off of their in-store recorders and into the network.  With that simple step they have just enabled their company to investigate any single transaction that occurs in their business as far back as they would like and they never even had to mention the project to IT.  If they decided they didn’t need every single transaction (if instead of 15 transactions, you had 1500 you might want to be a little more precise in your criteria for archiving) they could simply change the archiving rule and narrow down the amount of transactions that get stored centrally.

Saving video off-premise is definitely something that can be done by traditional video systems, but even those that are more enterprise software platforms (not SaaS and definitely not MVaaS) require a large amount of IT involvement to pull off what I described above.  From the customers standpoint (both user and IT) everything I described above can be set up and implemented by a single user sitting in a Starbucks sipping a latte.  Pretty cool stuff.