Airship DVR / NVR Video & Video Management Blog

New potential customers, new ideas

In the past year or so, you've heard and read about Airship for Casinos. While this is a very important market for us, it is not the only market that we hope to help. How about... Retail?

A new distributor in the midwest has connections with many retail chains and other similar businesses. Their input to us while they are learning to use Airship centers around a pair of issues.

Casinos and other large entertainment venues tend to have live monitoring and review history to gather incident information or keep track of legally mandated evidence of gaming wins and losses. This differs greatly from Retail and other markets, where there is little or no live monitoring and the most important thing to the user is the ability to review alarms and then find video if necessary. In short, Casino Surveillance Operators demand full features and user interface performance, while Retail Security and/or Surveillance Operators demand ease of use and a streamlined workflow.

Two points of view, seemingly at odds.

We think we can do both, exceptionally well. The ease of use and streamlining needed by the once-a-day user in Retail can easily be applied to the constant use scenario of live monitoring and review. In some cases, a user's workstation might have a user interface which immediately opens to the primary report that they want to see every day. For example, a timeline of the past several days with clear indications of motion detection and other alarms. In other cases, the UI might open directly to the set of live views a particular user needs to be concerned with, and at given times of day might automagically switch to another set of live views, such as during soft count or money safe transfers. This sort of thoughtful streamlining helps the operator get what they want, when they want it. With thoughtful administrative oversight, this can also help operators not make simple mistakes or forget an important daily event.

These features are on our mind as we talk with our new potential customers and learn how they deal with security and surveillance.

Got any ideas you want to share? Use our customer feedback form here.

by Gryphon MacThoy

Managing Camera Names

Our Airship enterprise management system can manage camera names on a DVR from a client (with a remote connection to a DVR's setup), from a DVR, or from the Web Management tool. Before last week there a bug in the camera name management, which would allow the camera name modifications made simultaneously from one application (e.g. Web management tool) would be lost/overwritten if modifications made on the application (e.g. DVR) were saved. The reason this was happening was the DVRs would download the camera information from the Enterprise Management Suite on startup and the camera name modifications done on the EMS between this download and saving of the camera names modified on the DVR would never be updated on the DVR. So when a user saves the camera name changes on the DVR, all the modifications made on the EMS were being lost.

Last week I worked on resolving this bug by merging all the changes before being saved and resolve the conflicting changes by taking the latest modification.

PRASOON

Converting to Salesforce

We have a new remote Salesperson located in Las Vegas. Since we will have more remote sales folks, we figured it was time to use something like Salesforce to make it easy to track information and what not. Here's my recent email to my account rep, explaining how frustrating it is to get our existing data imported:

===============
(Dude's Name),

OK, since we can't cancel our account, we've decided to try to make the best of it and see if we can make use of Salesforce.

The biggest problems we have are with data manipulation. For example:

I've tried importing our Accounts data. There are several problems with this:
a) I'm exporting a csv file from MS Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager's Accounts folder. The import process in Salesforce tells me that "The file you uploaded does not meet the requirements for the encoding you specified. The file may be in a different encoding or may be corrupt." There are no encoding options available to me when I select the 'Microsoft Outlook' option. So, I try the Other Data Sources option. I choose UTF-8 as the encoding option.

b) Lack of address data importing. I get to the mapping fields part and there are simply no address fields available to map. My CSV file has address fields, but the import field mapping list doesn't. Account data without addresses? Really? But then it's there inside Salesforce. So, how do I import it?

c) Even if I import all of my contacts and decide to hand enter all of my Accounts, assigning Contacts to Accounts is very laborious and time consuming. I have to, one at a time, do this to every contact:
1- Open the lead.
2- Convert the lead.
3- Set the Account value
4- Uncheck the opportunity box.
5- Uncheck the reminder box at the bottom.
6- Go back to the Leads tab.

I have 2,000 records to do this with. Tell me there's another way. Here's what I'd expect:

I want to select a set of Leads and Convert them all at once.
I want to select a set of Leads and assign them all to an Account, all at once. Some of our Accounts have dozens of contacts, s your import's limitation on 2 contacts per Account at import is really disturbing.
I want to be able to select a set of leads and mass-update any number of details about them, from Lead Source to future reminders, active/inactive, change owner, etc, etc.

So, that's where we are stuck with wanting to cancel Salesforce. Just getting my data ( a paltry 2000 records ) into your system has been strange and difficult. I can pass my 2000 records from Outlook to  Thunderbird to Mac and back to Outlook without losing any information. Why can't I upload the same data to Salesforce?

I am willing pay extra for someone else to do the import for us - just tell me who to go to. Now that we are beginning to hire folks in other parts of the country, Salesforce is a natual solution - IF we can get our data imported.

One more item:
Trying to import accounts - there's no Account Name field in your import field list. Nor Company Name, or anything like that. Just Full Name, First Name, and Last Name. Those Name fields aren't even present in the Accounts field list when I hand enter an Account. What gives?

(Your devoted fan, etc...)
==============

I can't even find that they have a data importing service. I'd think that would be a profit center for them. $500 to map the fields, remove duplicates, setup Account/Contact associations, etc.

Oh well, what do I know? I'm just a customer will to pay more to make things easy for me.

- by Gryphon MacThoy

A Look Around The Office

or... Who's Watching the Watchers?

We keep inviting folks to visit, but it's hard to get away from work. We understand. And we have a way for you to visit, virtually...

You can use our Airship Client Demo to operate a PTZ camera and take a look around our office!

Go to our Airship Client Demo page here:
http://www.airshipdvr.com/free_DVR_software_trial.php
Download the Desktop Client and install it.
Run the Airship Client, login as user 'system' with a blank password, if prompted.
View our CIF30fps PTZ Lobby camera.
Use the PTZ controls at the bottom left to move the PTZ camera around.

Now, since internet traffic will make the PTZ controls feel sluggish, we have pre-programmed several PTZ Presets.
Click on the Presets button at the bottom left of the Airship Client. Enter any two digit preset (01-08) and click Go To Preset.

Feel free to look around the Airship Client AND our offices - if you see anyone (like lunchtime at the conference table, with the stereo bumpin') send us a comment here!

by Gryphon MacThoy

New Hire, an Opportunity to Refresh

Whenever we hire someone new, I take it as an opportunity to reestablish how easy our software is to learn and use. I always learn that something could be made easier, maybe with less clicks or more clear labels. This time, our new hire is a veteran of the surveillance industry, and he knows many different video surveillance systems on the market.

THIS is going to be fun. I'll write a follow up at the end of today.

by Gryphon MacThoy