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.

Yesterday I blogged about sharing video from a web camera. Today, I’d like to talk about sharing video from surveillance cameras. What is typical state-of-the-art today? The answer is not very sophisticated. A user typically would need to travel to be physically next to the DVR. Then they would use the user interface to burn a CD-ROM or a DVD. Finally, they would hand carry or mail the disc to its intended recipient.

Now, this is actually a pretty efficient way to transport data. I like to remind my collegues that you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 loaded with Magtape. Although, in this day and age, the analogy really is “loaded with DVD-R discs”. If you’re curious, a 747-400 could hold approximately 2.5 Petabytes of data, and assuming a flight time from DEN to SFO of two and a half hours, would represent a bandwidth of approximately 1 Terabit per second. That’s damm big, even by today’s Internet standards. Thats’s some Sneakernet! But I digress.
It would be really neat if you could share your video with, lets say the Police, in the following way. Save the clip in question into your MVaaS provider’s cloud. Create a group called “Police Video“. Invite your local law enforcement officer to join the group as a guest and voila, they can view the video.

Gosh, maybe there’s even an MVaaS company who has built that feature already.

That sure beats sneakernet!

Here is yet another photo sharing site whose innovation is around the layout of photos, allowing you to share them in books ala scrap-book style. Its interesting to see there is still innovation (you be the judge of good or bad) in this area. Which brings me to ask, how to you typically share video?

Well, the answer to that question is quite different if you mean video from your web cam or video from your managed video system. In the web cam case, you can share the video through one of about hundred sites or you can upload the video to your favorite social networking site. Take facebook, for example, you can upload the video to a facebook group, invite your friends to access the group, and easily share the video online.

Now, what if you want to share video from a fixed surveillance camera with a few people. What are your choices, and what does that have to do with facebook?

Image by julie varnau via Flickr

You may have heard that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) just came online yesterday.  There are a bunch of nonsensical fears that the LHC could create a black hole that would destroy the Earth.

This reminded me of a great, stay up all night and read it book called “Earth”, by David Brin.   If you like Michael Crichton, you’ll probably love Earth.

When looking this up I noticed Mr. Brin also wrote a book called the “Transparent Society” in 1998.    In this fiction Brin explores how the massive amount of video surveillance in our society may result in something much different than the Orwellian nightmare of 1984.  Instead Brin proposes that rather than a sinister master agent of control, everyone will be watching each other.  Cameras would become a public resource that are used by everyone to make sure our children are playing safely in the park, there’s no boogeyman around the corner and that the watchers themselves will be watched preventing an abuse of power.

Think I’ll have to pick that one up.

Welcome to the newest member of the MVaaS community, www.gotomycamera.com. This service, which has been launched by Eptascape, is entirely web hosted and provides storage of IP camera originated video. A user can log in from anywhere on the Internet and access their video.

The system is using Amazon’s cloud storage, so they should be able to scale to very large amounts of storage.

This points out an interesting benefit of MVaaS: virutally unlimited computing resources. In any typical non-MVaaS (as in enterprise hosted) system, the compute resources available to apply to video processing are relatively fixed. You have to buy more hardware if you need it.

Using an MVaaS approach, where the compute resources are in the cloud, you have access to an essentially unlimited platform for computing. It’s interesting that Eptascape has an analyitics product — seems like a great combination to take advantage of cloud computing.

We recently underwent a re-engineering of our Internet facing infrastructure to increase resilience and redundancy. We utilized a boutique network consulting firm that has designed the infrastructure of such giants as facebook and myspace.

Our Internet facing infrastructure is pretty standard: redundant firewalls, load balancers, and network switches. With this new network design, we can undergo multiple failures (for example one firewall, a load balancer and a network switch) without dropping, in most cases, a single packet.

This is really neat stuff which I won’t dive into. The interesting point is that since the infrastructure is so redundant, we now need to work extra hard to realize that a componant has failed. When the entire set of network devices are so self-healing, it is actually pretty hard to determine that one has failed. What an unexpected problem for an MVaaS provider!

As the Brits would say, “touch wood“.

Why is Fall the start of so many things? As if this time of year isn’t busy enough with the start of school, extra-curricular sports and activities, when you add the season premieres of various tv shows, it’s a recipe for sleep deprivation. This Fall has been particularly busy. I’m ordinarily not much of a tv-watcher. I have a handful of favorite shows, and I rely heavily on our DVR to store them until I have time to watch. Lately, however, it’s been hard to keep up. First it was the Summer Olympics, then the Democratic and Republican conventions, and now it’s the season-openers of all of the tv series. It also happens that our tv provider “upgraded” our service to an integrated High Definition DVR. The problem is that the storage capacity of this DVR is severely limited by the amount of bandwidth that HD shows consume. Before I have a chance to watch a show I’ve stored, it gets dumped off to record another. Not much of an upgrade, actually.

I think it would make more sense if the season premieres took place during another time of year, like January, when the post-holiday doldrums hit and when the weather makes it more likely you’ll be spending time indoors watching tv. After all, isn’t January the true start of the year?