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.

We just recently (Oct 30) pushed a new feature of Envysion Video — online trouble ticketing support. There is now a link on our page that allows a user to automatically generate a trouble ticket into our Network Operations Center.

It’s always interesting to develop a feature like this. The most difficult decision was to decide what text to put on our application. Examples of text that we didn’t use:

“Don’t Panic” — we all liked this Douglas Adams reference, but it seemed too edgy for our customers and who knows, maybe its trademarked!

“In case of Problem” — nice and simple, except Marketing was concerned that we might be indicating to our users that the system can have a problem…can’t do that!

“HELP” — short and to the point; however we were unsure if it really was descriptive enough.

“ID-10-T Error” — ok, we didn’t even consider that one.

“Big Red Button” — this was our code name for the project. We considered a simple, red button. Or, if you enjoy Ren and Stimpy, the “jolly, candy-like button”. This was our staff favorite and quite edgy, but still wouldn’t necessarily indicate what it does.

We ended with “Report Issue”. Perhaps not as edgy as we’d like, but it does turn RED when you press it!

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.