The JDL Blog

The future of advertising is watching you

No more simply watching ads. They will watch you (UK's Times Online)

Quividi [a French marketing technology firm] installs camera systems in billboards and a computer analyses passers-by. “We know this many people have walked in front of the screen, how many turned to face the ad, and how long they looked at it,” says Paolo Prandoni, Quividi’s chief scientific officer. “We can even tell their gender with an accuracy of 85% and measure who approaches to find out more.”

Quividi has digital adverts that change depending on whether a man or woman is watching and is working on upgrading its system to detect different ages and even family groups.

– Abigail

Boiled down

I love IP Video Market Info. Here's their boil-down of the state of the debate over civic video surveillance:

Key Findings Summary

• The expectation that CCTV systems should be deployed to reduce crime rather than solve crime has created huge problems.
• While the studies show serious doubt on CCTV's ability to reduce crime generally, a strong consensus exists in CCTV's ability to reduce premeditative/property crime
• CCTV is consistently treated as a singular, stable technology, obscuring radical technological changes that have occurred in the last 10 years
• Differences in per camera costs are largely ignored, preventing policy makers from finding ways to reduce costs
• Routine comparison of police vs cameras is counterproductive

Practical Recommendations Summary

• Stop claiming that CCTV can generally reduce crime
• Optimize future public CCTV projects around crime solving rather than crime reduction
• Optimize future public CCTV projects around material and premeditative crimes
• Target technologies that support crime solving and material/premeditative crimes
• Focus on minimizing cost per camera

There's a lot more dialogue about whether to deploy surveillance cameras, and where, than about how to deploy and monitor/use them.

People either want cameras because they want reduced crime (as we see above, unrealistic except in the systemic, longterm sense that more criminals will be caught and therefore taken off the streets) or they don't want them because they feel watched (most civic cameras are unmonitored, their recorded video is used exclusively as post-crime forensic tools).

Looking at new ways to monitor based on alarms or review of recorded video samples will be important going forward. In the same way business are using surveillance video to improve customer experience (read: revenue), law enforcement authorities should use recorded video to better understand patterns of crime and the activities that precede them and can be identified as signals that can be the basis of preventive actions.

- Abigail

Artists develop security against security

Artists in Germany, interested in enriching the debate about public surveillance, exhibited a device that passively protects the anonymity of those being surveilled...

The I-R.A.S.C. is an infrared device, which protects against infrared surveillance cameras. It can be made by anybody; no special skills are required. The device radiates infrared light disrupting the reception of infrared surveillance cameras. A sphere of light covers the face of the person under surveillance and as the interaction is invisible to the human eye (at a frequency between 780nm and 1mm), the individual is unaware of what is going on i.e. they don't see the infrared rays emitted by either the surveillance camera or the I-R.A.S.C.

I'm not sure how widely adopted IR camera technologies are in civic surveillance, but since they're made for low-light and night vision applications, I imagine it's higher than average.

The dialogue continues...

- Abigail

Chicago floats new ordinance

After passing an odinance last year requiring late hours establishments to install security video at exits and entrances and to develop a safety plan, the city is now looking at an ordinance that will require owners of buildings that have been vacant for 6 months to install alarm systems (Chicago Sun-Times) and to have a current monitoring contract.

This seems difficult. And not just to me. Security Systems News writes:

Another inhibiting factor to compliance is the lack of basic infrastructure in vacant buildings, said Chester Donati, president of DMC Security Systems and president of the Illinois Electronic Security Association. "What about the communications network? There's not likely to be power or phone in the buildings," he said. Also, if the building is in foreclosure, he wondered, who's responsible for maintaining the property, the building owner or the bank?

Neither Donati nor Andrews believed passage of this law would be a significant opportunity for security integrators. "A lot of the units in question are in depressed areas of the city," said Donati. "I don't know if I would feel comfortable sending my installers to these vacant houses without some sort of assistance.

"I suppose in the long run [this could be beneficial], but people are reluctant to spend money," said Andrews. "I think because there's significant cost involved, most owners will wait until they get caught, not voluntarily comply. This could get expensive and may lead to demolishing a lot of buildings."

- Abigail

People want remote access

Starbucks and ADT are having a potentially expensive tiff over what "proprietary" means in the world of security alarms.

A reminder to us all to be very careful when we put together contracts with our customers.

Dueling lawsuits filed this past week detail the rupture of a decadelong relationship during which ADT Security Services installed alarm systems at more than 2,400 of Starbucks' 7,257 company-owned U.S. stores.

Starbucks tried switching some locations to another monitoring company in 2005, only to discover that many had ADT-installed security chips that won't allow anyone else to reprogram the alarms remotely.

With a shifting roster of employees and frequent after-hours deliveries, Starbucks says it needs the flexibility to update the systems remotely. It claims that ADT and a predecessor firm consistently said they were installing alarms that were not proprietary.

I get the impression Starbucks had evolving needs that for one or more reasons were not being met under their contract with ADT.

That one of the driving factors was a desire to be able to manage the system remotely comes as no surprise, because our customers rely on that ability when it comes to their video surveillance systems.

- Abigail

An awesome challenge

Via our VP of development, the following awesome challenge: 

"vitamin water for the first person to point out how this is done and how it is peripherally related to us."

Abigail

Enhanced info sharing on the horizon?

According to IP Security Watch, Harrah's plan is to put everything IP onto one big secure VLAN'ed network. Extend this all the way to the end of their goal: They will have video, POS, and any other network traffic within the casino on the same physical connection. 

It would seem they will have some fast talking to do to get this by Nevada Gaming. If they do, there may be a precedent that we would be able to draw upon for Washington Gaming. Cisco certainly has the chops and the money to make this case to Nevada — and it would be a huge win for them (and us) as these casinos are networked with more secure info than a bank. The info-sharing from a business standpoint would be extremely useful for any casino. 

I doubt they will put an IP video system onto this network but they are talking about a level of secure interconnectivity which would allow them transmission of video from Surveillance to other locations and info such as POS and Gaming Mgmt into Surveillance as one secure network.

We'll have to keep an eye on this and see where it goes.

Doug

A new favorite webcam

Thanks to the Network Webcams blog, I now know I can watch barbering as it happens in Scotland. That's right, haircuts! Whenever I want. Warning, it's really addictive. No two cuts are identical.

Abigail

Probably a cool spot on Earth

Next time I'm in Melville, NY I am totally going to go see the new Honeywell Alarm Museum. What a cool project!

The SDM blog reports:

The museum is a time capsule of Honeywell's journey to where it is today -- and a reflection of the evolvement of the security industry. The switches, photos, price lists, and more lining the shelves all trace the development of alarm systems from 1929 until now.

Leo Guthart, an industry icon who joined ADEMCO in 1964, said that the museum “memorializes this company [ADEMCO], which effectively memorializes the entire security industry in this country. You can see the development of the company’s product line and paralleling that is the growth of the industry itself, which has been enormous.”

Abigail

Make information come back to you

When we were at ISC West last year, our suite at the Wynn had a mini-bar innovation that was...surprising. If you picked up the pack of peanuts, or any other drink or snack, from the tray and didn't put it back in its place within 30 seconds, it would be added automatically to your room tab.

(A TripAdvisor visitor to the Wynn put it this way: "The refrigerator in each room is now "wired" to be touch sensitive. Moving any item for more than a few seconds, incurs a charge automatically, whether the item consumed or not!")

Looks like Nebraska Furniture Mart is using a similar technology from MTI Interactive called Lift  to activate a product presentation on a nearby display screen whenever a customer picks up a cell phone or digital camera.

It's useful for the Furniture Mart to be able to present videos on a screen to a customer with the product in their hands, but wouldn't it be oh-so-much better for them to integrate Lift with their video system so they could collect information rather than just sending it out? I know, it's a paradigm shift.

Imagine this: Lift also triggers recording of surveillance video, and could record customer reactions to, say, a series of three sales presentations so they could determine which was most effective and then play that one more often. Ditch the presentation everyone walks away from, keep the one that engages people and leads to sales (link in the POS, too, so you can review different time periods with different sales presentations being served...

Lift is new technology, and it's impressive. But it's old-school thinking to think that making a sales pitch is enough. Let the customer passively tell you how you're doing, and you're in a whole new millenium.

Abigail

Quick delivery

On its Official Blog, Google lays out its mission in clear, simple language:

Ranking is hard, much harder than most people realize. One reason for this is that languages are inherently ambiguous, and documents do not follow any set of rules. There are really no standards for how to convey information, so we need to be able to understand all web pages, written by anyone, for any reason. And that's just half of the problem. We also need to understand the queries people pose, which are on average fewer than three words, and map them to our understanding of all documents. Not to mention that different people have different needs. And we have to do all of that in a few milliseconds.

Another team in our group is responsible for evaluating how well we're doing. This is done in many different ways, but the goal is always the same: improve the user experience. This is not the main goal, it is the only goal.

Considering this made me feel better about the backflips we've been doing to make ourselves more visible to Google and other engines. One thing that's changed is that our page titles and headlines have become less creative, more simple and direct. There's something you lose when you have to put things in the plainest way, but then again in an age of incredibly short attention spans, it's just as well to let people absorb your ideas and themes as quickly and easily as possible.

As a web writer, I have to think like a UI designer — or in fact like Google — getting people to the "kernels" of information or the action they are seeking to take as quickly as possible.

Abigail

Embedded support

Recently I fixed a few issues with Hybrid client (with embedded support). Yanda and Matt helped a lot in resolving these issues. Some of these issues were related to Embedded DVR models that we did not test our client with and some others were related to insufficient/inaccurate information provided by the hardware manufacturer's SDK and the rest  (very few) were related to coding while having beer :-).

Our Hybrid client now is more robust and reliable than it was about two weeks ago. A potential customer of ours who sells tens of thousands of channels of embedded DVRs every year is actually helping us in finding issues (he carries a lot of the embedded DVR models that he can test our software) and he loves our software more that any others.

Thus, last week was a very satisfactory one.

Prasoon

A use for Baby Bell wax

Late breaking development

If only they could have done this 3 years ago (Securityinfowatch)

Axis, Bosch, Sony to collaborate on creating a global standard for network video products.

The cooperation between these three companies is intended to facilitate the integration of various brands of video equipment and to encourage interoperability of products by manufacturers, software developers and independent software vendors.

Doug

256 Channel support

We proudly announce support for 256 channels on our Core4 software. We recently worked on getting our Core4 to be compatible with 256 channels. I tested on my dev box with encoder cards amounting to 72 channels successfully. Recording and playback worked fine with this setup on my box. One of our partners requested support for more than 64 channels and we decided to go for 256 channel support.

One caveat is that user-based permissions for channels above 64 are not implemented yet, meaning all the channels above 64 will be available for preview and playback for all client/DVR users.

Prasoon

First Chicago last year, now a southern Illinois town

More late-hours businesses required to use video surveillance for public safety (Securityinfowatch)

The town of Collinsville, Ill., is turning to video surveillance camera systems in its quest to cut back on violent crimes. The town passed an ordinance this week that requires some business that are open through the night — gas stations and convenience stores, primarily — to install video surveillance systems.

Abigail

A maturing marketplace

Here's someone (Slashdot) whose dilemma is a sign that consumers are becoming much more savvy and starting to question the value of cheap-o "home" systems.

To me, the object isn't just deterrence — if someone tries to break into my house or my car (parked on the street in front of my house), I'd like to provide a high-quality image of the perpetrator to the police. Inexpensive video surveillance systems, with their atrocious image quality, are nearly useless. The problem is being able to get good image quality at an affordable price.

He has some good questions, maybe some of you could answer.

Abigail

Your biggest video surveillance concerns

Last poll asked about your biggest current surveillance concern. Your responses tells us we're not wasting our time as we — and no doubt many other developers — make integration of traditional coax surveillance with the IT network better and more painless.

Abigail

Barriers to network surveillance overtaking traditional CCTV

A new report (Multimedia Intelligence, summarized by DSP Design Line) about traditional CCTV/IT-network convergence is out and basically says network surveillance cameras are a small segment of the market but are growing at 4x the rate of other segments. However, a primary barrier persists: the need for organizational change, both in the end customers as well as in the distribution channel.

The transition from traditional CCTV surveillance to networked digital surveillance is revolutionary for the physical security industry. Yet this transition is also seen as over-hyped and under-performing compared to many expectations. Both are true.

Certainly, we are aware of these unmet expectations. End users hear the buzz and clamor for the sexiness and benefits of IP / megapixel cameras, and there are many good rerasons why this technology is exciting and is going to be standard before too long. Meanwhile, users needing solutions today are finding that...

• IP-only systems are a replace-everything proposition (very expensive) for those wishing to preserve existing analog recording investments


• IP cameras have large bandwidth and video storage requirements that are expensive to accommodate, especially with an all-IP system — unless you dial down the frame rate and/or resolution



• IP networks introduce latency issues to varying degrees, depending on the network design — making them problematic for environments with zero tolerance for latency

These conditions are temporary, and the future of surveillance is definitely on the network. But right now users need to be able to strategically add IP cameras ONLY where they are cost effective, and to retain their analog cameras for the locations where they make better business sense.

And with most major providers offering cobbled-together solutions that are very expensive, difficult to understand and integrate (where a lot happens under the proprietary hood), it's no wonder many Integrators are staying with older systems they know how to make work. And which and fit their customers' budgets. After all, they're they guys on the ground fronting the technology, being held out to dry when things don't go well.

It's not like in the glossy full-page ads about the effortless new era of IT convergence.

Like everyone else, our development team is wrestling with all of these factors every day. I'm glad we are working on an open platform that people can actually understand, that integrates easily with third-party network applications as they hit the marketplace. I'd hate for us to be in any other position.

Abigail

We're hiring. (Integral?)

So, we're growing our Sales and Business Development teams.

If you used to work for Integral (or want to be able to say that you USED to work for Integral) come talk to us. Email us at jobs@jdlds.com or call us at 425.467.8088 for more information.

(No, we're not kidding. Your experience is valuable — don't let anyone tell you otherwise.)

Gryph