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?

I had a series of posts in June asking the simple question, who’s bigger, Salesforce.com or GM? (I, II, III, IV)

The series concludes here, indicating that Salesforce.com’s market capitalization remained slightly behind that of General Motors.  At least this was true on June 4th.

Well, some things have changed.  Most who are interested in economic issues are well aware of the challenges now facing GM (and for that matter, Ford and Chrysler).  A multi-billion dollar bailout  may be next.  It has not been an easy run for the ”Big Three” automakers.  GM’s market capitalization has been battered (~$6.1 billion).

Salesforce.com has also faced some challenges.  While they set company records with their 2nd quarter profits, the results were short of investor expectations, and the stock plummeted 8% in one day.  The San Francisco based company is now valued at ~$6.6 billion.

Perhaps this is an unfair comparison, especially given the very difficult situation in the auto industry.  Still, who would you rather own?

Cognitive dissonance describes the stress that develops when we hold two ideas that are inconsistent.  The theory of cognitive dissonance purports that we all have a fundamental drive to reduce this stress, which may include minimizing, denying, or avoiding contradictory evidence.  As a natural extension, we also tend to seek input that is consistent with our beliefs (confirmation bias).

Cognitive dissonance, of course, impacts us in all aspects of our lives, including our business dealings.  Are the employees we hire outstanding model citizens, simply because we are great judges of character?  Or rather, do we have low regard for some of our employees?  Is it not appropriate to challenge our beliefs with potentially contradictory evidence?

Video, when properly utilized, can help to confirm, or abandon, these pre-conceptions.  Our employees, and customers, will be the beneficiaries.

I think John has it right that it’s going to take several years before managed video is as big as the general IP video market is today.  J. C. R. Licklider wrote back in 1965: “A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years…”.  Bill Gates said something similar in the 90’s.  It’s not uncommon for even only incrementally new technologies to take 3-5 years to reach critical mass.

The speed of market acceptance and adoption of managed video will also take time.  Technology and bandwidth are not barriers, but only with the right mix of centralized and distributed software, storage and video streaming.  Envysion is doing it today.

However, operating a managed video system at scales of over a millon cameras is something that’s going to take considerable “know-how” that only comes from having “been there and done that” over years of learning.

Managed video may be plug-and-play at the edge, but scaling up all the systems necessary to keeping everything running well together is not plug-and-play.  Fortunately we’ve accomplished similar feats in the telecom space building the backbones of the Internet and voice over IP systems.

In 5 or 10 years, a million cameras will feel like just the start.  It’s crystal clear to me that there is enormous growth potential for managed video.

Outsourcers provide detailed reports outlining performance and allow them to listen to calls, but for many companies who outsource, seeing is believing.

Below are my top 10 reasons video, and especially MVaaS, is a great fit in the call center world:

1) Call centers tend to be distributed and the geographical challenges of getting to them makes inspecting what is going on very difficult. Many are distributed around the world which makes travel expensive, difficult and time consuming.
2) Basic security - most have basic video, but only at exits, in parking lots, etc…  There is a huge issue with theft, especially with stealing of supplies, hardware in customer labs, pc’s, printers, and others.

3) Call centers have plenty of bandwidth to allow remote viewing.
4) Video can be used to check on policy adherence and to ensure that managers are with the teams, not locked in their offices. For example, call center agents are not supposed to have cell phones or writing info on their desks due to taking credit cards. There are big fraud issue with these types of transactions. Smoking policy adherence, shredding of docs, cleanliness and other policies can be checked as well.
5) By adding Audio to training rooms with video, remote call center management and HR can inspect training procedure effectiveness and employee engagement.
6) Outsourcers can give “control” which is the biggest concern of outsourcing, to the clients, to look into the centers where they have their work done to check status.

7) Integration with access control systems to ensure only employees who are supposed to be there.
Call centers across the globe can share documented best practices.
9) Many call centers have cafes and will have some POS system, so looking for anomalies and exceptions can reduce shrinkage.
10) There are a lot of shenanigans in call centers. Drugs, employee misconduct, and many other issues arise, espeically with the density of people in a call center.  The employees tend to be younger (especially overseas), paid between 2 and 10 dollars per hour, and are not mature professionals.

Last week:

Average number of unique users accessing video per customer: 15

Average number of logins per unique user: 3.9

Maximum unique users accessing video per customer: 464

In layman’s terms, this means that an average of 15 different people per customer used our video service last week and that those 15 users logged in to use the service an average of 4 times during the week, which is 4 out of 5 business days.  It also means that one of our customers had over 464 different people access video during one week alone.

This is impressive on a number of fronts.  One, it shows how extensively video can be used within an organization if you make it easy to use and easy to manage (we’ve talked a lot about how MVaaS addresses those two things versus traditional systems).  Two (and the real focus of this post), the fact that we can even track those statistics is pretty impressive.  You can’t do that if you are using traditional PC-based DVR solutions that aren’t centrally managed - it would be challenging to aggregate user activity across multiple individual DVRs, if the individual DVRs even tracked usage at all.

Why does this matter to customers? If you don’t think reviewing video adds value beyond security, then it probably doesn’t matter that much.  If, however, you make an investment in a video service because you expect a return, then you are likely expecting people to actually use the video.  With statistics like these, a customer can ensure that all of the people that they want to use video (loss prevention, store managers, regional managers, marketing, etc.) are actually using it.  The administrator or project sponsor can easily pull up a report that shows how many times each authorized user used the service, when they last logged in, etc.  With this information they can figure out who might need more training or some additional encouragement.  They could also compare usage to store performance to get a more precise view of the return on investment that are getting from video.

Stealing a line from someone I can’t remember, “if you can measure it you can manage it”.

I frequently talk about using data to enhance the usefulness of video, but what about a video composed entirely of data?  Radiohead’s House of Cards video is just that, a video created completely from data.

Radiohead used similar technology that Google uses in Google Earth to capture 3-D models of buildings.

Would 3D video capture be of any interest? Although perhaps many years away from commercialization, it seems such technology could greatly improve intelligent video / video analytics. I think we’re getting a bit closer to virtual reality one step at a time. Hmmmm. If this doesn’t spark a little imagination for you, perhaps I am a bit Too White and Nerdy

Paradoxically, one of the necessary ways to fight identify theft is to share information about yourself. This is necessary because you can’t prevent someone from pretending to be you unless the person you are communicating with has some information about you.

Using one’s intrinsic physical and behavioral traits to prove your identity is called Biometrics.

Scientific American recently published some data on the effectiveness of different biometric methods for fighting identity theft.

An interesting question that Ori Pessach brought up recently was, “What do you do when your physical traits is compromised?”  If someone can reproduce your fingerprint (which is very difficult, but not impossible), how do you replace it?

In all practicality, using several different methods simultanously to identify a person greatly strengthens the proof that the person is who they say they are.  Just make sure at least one if not two of these methods can be changed!

While over 90% of the business community is still using Windows, I’m pleased that the growing number of users running Mac can enjoy our remote enterprise management system.