This week marks Envysion’s 3rd anniversary in its current form.  Three years ago a handful of us started the company with some seed money from our investors, a shell of a struggling legacy company and an idea for a new business model.

I am very proud of the team and the accomplishments that we’ve made together over the past few years.  We’ve taken a concept and translated it into a hardened service that is delivering tremendous value for our customers.  We’ve created a whole new category, Managed Video as a Service, that customers, competitors and analysts alike have all recognized as an exciting new segment.  We’ve added channel partners that are actively promoting our service and are growing our customer base with major national brands in restaurant, retail and hospitality segments.  We continue to add new capabilities that leverage our SaaS model and continue to differentiate our service.

While the macro-economic climate is tough for everyone these days, I believe that year 4 is going to be the breakout year for Envysion as we take advantage of the market opportunity created by customers needing to do more with less people and resources and by competitors that continue to cut back on development and fall further behind in the technology race.

Look for some good announcements from us on the product, customer and partner fronts over the next few weeks.  We’re just getting started…

An old-skool RFC for those of you who remember such things…I present to you RFC 968 by Vint Cerf.

Twas the night before start-up and all through the net,
     not a packet was moving; no bit nor octet.
The engineers rattled their cards in despair,
     hoping a bad chip would blow with a flare.
The salesmen were nestled all snug in their beds,
     while visions of data nets danced in their heads.
And I with my datascope tracings and dumps
     prepared for some pretty bad bruises and lumps.
When out in the hall there arose such a clatter,
     I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter.

There stood at the threshold with PC in tow,
     An ARPANET hacker, all ready to go.
I could see from the creases that covered his brow,
     he’d conquer the crisis confronting him now.
More rapid than eagles, he checked each alarm
     and scrutinized each for its potential harm.

On LAPB, on OSI, X.25!
     TCP, SNA, V.35!

His eyes were afire with the strength of his gaze;
     no bug could hide long; not for hours or days.
A wink of his eye and a twitch of his head,
     soon gave me to know I had little to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
     fixing a net that had gone plumb berserk;
And laying a finger on one suspect line,
     he entered a patch and the net came up fine!

The packets flowed neatly and protocols matched;
     the hosts interfaced and shift-registers latched.
He tested the system from Gateway to PAD;
     not one bit was dropped; no checksum was bad.
At last he was finished and wearily sighed
     and turned to explain why the system had died.

I twisted my fingers and counted to ten;
     an off-by-one index had done it again…

When dealing with video surveillance from across the globe, figuring out what time it is can be a complicated thing, or at least hurt your brain a little bit.   Can’t we just run everything in metric time?  Oh, on second thought, I’m not sure that’s any easier.

At Envysion, when you search for video and events, our application automatically converts whatever time you’re searching for to the localtime of the location.  This applies even if one searches across multiple locations.  ie:  Searching for 5pm (not matter where you are), returns results from 5pm EST, 5pm CST and so on.  We hope this makes it a little easier for those who operate across multiple time zones.

-Darren

“Thanks to the city being under Mensa’s control, the trains are running on metric time.” – Principle Skinner, “The Simpsons“

A benefit of Managed-Video-As-A-Service is that it can scale to a large number of locations. One of the reasons MVaaS scales so well is that it borrows architectural elements from telecommunications network management principles. One of these principles is to collect data and monitor network elements.

Note the graph above. This is a screenshot from one of Envysion’s NOC tools that monitors the collection of point-of-sale data. At Envysion, we know, at any point of time, which DVR locations are correctly receiving point-of-sale data (i.e., working) and which are not. Note the anomoly in the above chart where red and yellow mean “not working” (each x-axis tick represents 6 hours and the y-axis represents number of DVRs).

One might normally be alarmed to see a massive spike in DVRs that haven’t collected point-of-sale data for 12+ hours…until you remember “oh that’s right, its Thanksgiving day” and almost all these stores are closed! Closed store == no transactions to collect.

There will be two more days in the next 31 days with graphs that look similar to the one above — anyone care to guess which days those will be?

Why is collecting this data important? It’s important because with this data we can immediately respond if point-of-sale data collection stops. This data is a critical enabler of our customer’s ROI. They expect it to be present every day and we work very hard to make it so.

Someday, providing telemetry and visualization such as the example above will be as common as CIF resolution in the video industry. It will be normal for a customer to ask a prospective video supplier “what percentage of sites have delivered POS data over the last 30 days?” In the mean time, here at Envysion, we will quietly keep raising the bar.

I decided, Sunday morning, to finally solve a Rubik’s cube. Afterall, it has only been 28 years since it was introduced by Ideal Toys. (Oh, and by solve, I don’t mean to disassemble the cube). No, I’ve gone and learned the cube notation and now I think in terms of R’U'R and the like.

I’ve never really tried to solve it. I’ve certainly spent time spinning it around casually. But this time, I virtually pulled out my trusty Wikipedia and started following the cross/top corner/middle edge algorithm documented here.

So yesterday afternoon, while I was re-reading step 3 “Middle edge pieces” for about the 17th time, my wife casually says “so, how come you’re cheating?”

I was astonished at audacity of that comment. Me? Cheating? “Why no”, I said, “I’m simply learning a tactic (I actually said alorithm) to solve the cube”.

“Oh, you’re cheating alright, because you’ve looked up the answer on the Internet”. I tried to argue that if it takes me an hour to get through one step, it isn’t exactly “looking up the answer”…to no avail.

Who knows, maybe I’m just slow. I am determined to solve it however. And I am officially at step 4, “solve remaining edge pieces”.

Here is an interesting link on youtube that explains how to set up an IP camera. It describes how to take an Axis camera that has the standard factory defaults and configure it to be available from the public Internet. This includes the steps necessary to configure an IP address on the camera, port forwarding on your access router and dynamic DNS.

All in all, there are about a dozen steps necessary to configure the camera. While not a daunting task for technically sharp person, it is definitely complex and error prone. Over the next few posts, I’ll look at some of the reasons why it is difficult to do and what our Industry could do to simplify this process.

Cisco announced they are investing $100M in product development, service and support for businesses with fewer than 100 employees.  Part of this investment includes the formation of a new business unit called the small business technology group.  You can see this groups new website at “Cisco Services of Small Business”. There you can find a link that helps you find Cisco powered service providers.

It’s not clear to me if this is simply repackaging and re-organizing of existing products.   Cisco merged channel partner programs between Linksys and Cisco brands very recently and perhaps this is related to that activity.     (As an engineer, it always amazes me how much one can spend simply changing the part numbers for products.  )

The announcement does claim that new Cisco Small Business products are scheduled to be available in December 2008 and will be focused on video surveillance, data storage and wireless office communications.

There was an interesting article on NPR about the increase in buyer’s remorse. Joseph LaRocca, vice president of loss prevention with the National Retail Federation estimates that retailers are expected to experience nearly $220 Billion (yes, that’s with a “B”) in returns in 2008.

That represents an unprecedented risk to retailers because with that many returns, it will be increasingly difficult to separate the real return from a fraudulent return.

Now, more than ever, it is critical for retailers to use an exception reporting system that lets them examine refunds to insure there is a person present and an actual item is returned.

Yesterday Rob Hagens and I attended the Colorado Inventor Showcase where we exhibited and were up for an award. We did not win but it was interesting to see all of the inventions that were present. The exhibits ranged from a smart toilet seat/lid that automatically closes to a very cool wind turbine for home use.

We had a good time and it was a good PR event for Envysion. Here’s a couple of short videos I took at the event with my iPhone:

The day is finally upon us. What seemed to be one of the longest campaigns in recent memory comes down to the wire as our nation decides the next leader of the free world.

Last evening, NBC aired a prime time SNL special featuring campaign skits from the past several years. One skit featured Obama dressed as himself at a Halloween party – from 2007! Puts into perspective just how long the campaign trail has been to get to where we are today.

There are dozens of initiatives on the ballot outside of the Presidential election. Many will affect your local community, county and state. Take advantage of this priviliage to let your voice be heard and vote today.