Airship DVR / NVR Video & Video Management Blog

Happy Halloween

This week's food post

I can't let a week go by without a food post. How about Men With Cupcakes as a theme?

To celebrate the season, Jim brought in some awesomely orange cupcakes yesterday which were appreciated by all.

Abigail

So you can see it

Here's what I was talking about in this post.

Abigail

Bored Games

I would really enjoy some confessions from among the Airship team! After all, they know I played Harry Potter.

Abigail

The Penalty of Leadership

Life works in funny ways, one of which brought me to buy an inexpensive but pristine '94 Cadillac as an interim car while we fix up our minivan to sell and then focus on what kind of fuel-efficient car to replace it with. 

Thumbing through the leatherbound "owner's literature," I came across a funny reproduction of an ad from 1915, something Cadillac obviously continued to hold dear to its brand identity for the 80 years after it ran just once in the Saturday Evening Post. Read the entire ad copy here.

Turns out, this ad was written to respond to some ads Packard was running that were making hay of the fact that defects were being discovered in the new 1915 Cadillac.

We're having a stressful week here, troubleshooting some tricky problems, and though I'm not aware of any potshots being taken at us, the truth is that when you strive to solve a problem  (enterprise grade video surveillance that is easy, compact, flexible, and stable) better than the next guy who's coasting along on so-so or even low-performance technology, you become a leader  — and you will encounter issues as you push forward into new territory.

I think we beat ourselves up more than anyone else does, but at least we don't just beat ourselves up. We continue with new information down the road of making things better.

And, speaking of making things better, I got some metallic chrome flame magnets to trick out the Caddy today. Woo hoo.

Abigail

PTZ

Recently, I was attending a WebCast on how Cisco Video Surveillance products can be used to address a variety of Public Sector applications. They had this very good PTZ feature where the user can click on a video from a camera and move the mouse to execute the PTZ commands. That feature rocks.

Prasoon

Aha! I knew we're onto something

OK, so a sample size of seven nine is not statistically authoritative. But I do find it interesting that the difficulty of installation — something we at Airship have made it our mission to stamp out — got the most votes in our little Web poll.

Abigail

Updated with more recent vote counts

Airship Store Pricing Updates

The Airship Store has been updated with new standard configurations and new pricing.

Pricing:

The LD Series and the SD Series went up in price last summer, but have now gone down again due to reduced price of hard drives in use. For example, the LD-805 dropped $400 in price at retail, and the SD-3203 when down over $2000 in price at retail.

A similar savings is available to all of our Authorized Resellers, too! (And, hey, you don't have to tell your customers about it...)

Now, let me be clear about how this price drop happened: The hard drive manufacturer (Seagate) reduced its pricing. Our parts supplier reduced their pricing. We reduced our pricing. That's it. We didn't go replace our favorite hard drive with a lesser performance part — it's still the Seagate SV35 Series storage drive designed for DVR appilcations. (You know, we could have just giggled our way to the bank on this one...)

New Configurations:

By using new 750 GB hard drives in our systems, we are able to provide greater storage capacities.

In the SD Series we have added a 4.5 TB option to both the SD-1600 and SD-3200. At CIF 30fps, that's at least 37 days of storage on the SD-1600 and at least 19 days of storage on the SD-3200!

For the HD Series we have added the 5.5 TB, 6.75 TB, and 8.25 TB options. (The old 6.5 TB is now gone.) At CIF 30fps, that's at least 34 days on the HD-3200 and at least 23 days on the HD-4800! And that's still always a RAID5 configuration.

As you might know, we also do a variety of customized systems, so when you look through the store, let your imagination run wild and then give us a call.

Gryphon MacThoy

What happens when a customer cares about you

As I am writing this post, we have a group of folks from a local casino visiting us and going over the deployment plans with their particular installation, also present is the integrator involved on the project.  I can't name names at the moment, but eventually we will be able to do so. 

I am perhaps more cynical and skeptical than most, I blame it on a bad childhood and having spent a good deal of time on Wall Street for my prior profession.  So it really blew me away when the casino guys asked if we can provide them with shall we say more bling with their systems.  They want their servers and workstations all tricked out with Airship paraphernalia.  "We want to be your showcase", the surveillance director told us, "and we are willing to pay for it". 

I am pretty speechless.  Is this what happens when the customers actually cares about you?  I guess so, and I need to learn to believe in the kindness of people again, even when it is business.  Wait, I just realized, we are not in the software business, we are in the people business.

-posted by Victor

Quirky habit

My various reading brought me to this blurb which struck me as interesting (confession: I do it too!)

My teenager at home, Internet-savvy as he is, still uses the Google search bar to find YouTube and Wikipedia – even though I've fussed at him repeatedly to just type in the URL. He's a good representative of the average surfer – the journey begins with a search engine.

Abigail