Airship DVR / NVR Video & Video Management Blog

Product Review: AVG Free Anti-Virus at Home

The best FREE Anti-Virus available:

AVG Free:

http://free.avg.com/download?prd=afe

Many of the Airship folks use this on Windows at home. For professional or office use, you have to pay for it, and it's worth it. For the 'leave me alone' user, it just runs and updates all by itself without bothering you until there's a major version update or a found virus. Small pop-ups by the task bar remind that it's doing it's job, but otherwise it stays out of the way. For the Virus Vigilante, there's plenty of toys to play with in your crusade against digital demons.

ps- we aren't paid to advertise, we just think it's a good product.

by Gryphon MacThoy

Why do people keep telling you the IP cameras you want are not viable?

Isn't it frustrating? You totally want IP cameras! Just like you totally want Video Analytics to help you sort data automatically. But whenever you ask, you're told that it's just not here yet, practical obstacles remain between you and all the hot new technologies.

IP Video Market Info does a great job of telling you why. The good news is that the top primary reasons identified are likely to change fast, and the secondary reasons are entirely under your/our control as an industry and its customers.

       Primary Problems

       * IP Cameras are too Expensive Compared to Analog Cameras

        * Storage for Megapixel cameras is too expensive

        * Smart Cameras are still in their infancy

    Secondary Problems

        * DVRs offer limited support

        * Lack of Integrator Training

Certainly, in the spirit of meeting customer needs and contributing to the progress of the industry as a whole, Airship has a roadmap that includes compatibility with each and every IP camera on the market. We started with Axis, and offer support of all their cameras. We are onto Arecont, and perhaps then Panasonic, but it will depend on customer demand. Yes, paying customer demand!

Another thing we're doing to combat these secondary obstacles to your ability to benefit from IP camera recording is partnering with our integrators in a meaningful way — out there, as a team in the field, or on the phone, accessibly, without the phone tree and BS you don't need.

But enough promo talk — the main thing is, these obstacles are melting away from one side and from the other side we can all work together to hasten their demise.

– Abigail

Seattle ferry license plate photo program

Here are some details about the license plate photo program (Bainbridge Island Review) I blogged about the other day.

WSP Sgt. Trent Cain said a camera photographs the license plate of each vehicle as it pulls away from the terminal toll booth. The license plate numbers are then digitized and checked against four criminal databases.

The system will automatically flag a vehicle if it has been reported stolen, if it is listed in an AMBER Alert, if someone associated with the vehicle is wanted for a felony crime, or if the license plate is "associated with a known or suspected terrorist," the release said.

If a vehicle matches any of those criteria, an alarm is sounded at a WSP command center, and a trooper is dispatched to verify the plate number and investigate the vehicle.

"It's adding another layer of security to our Washington State Ferries," Cain said.

According to the release, all license plate photos are stored for 60 days then deleted from the system. Vehicle occupants are not photographed and the information of registered owners will not be stored.

Cain said the Seattle to Bainbridge ferry run was chosen for testing the technology because of its high traffic volume.

The ALPR pilot project is being conducted through WSP’s Homeland Security Division, and was funded by a federal grant.

– Abigail

Never thought I'd be live blogging

Here's someone named Joel from KOMO 4 TV (and his cameraman) interviewing some people at the Seattle ferry dock. He was asking about a new program which will take a photo of the license plate of every car that boards the ferry. It's a homeland security program.

The questions Joel asked were about whether the program seemed likely to keep people safer, whether it seemed like a good investment of public money, whether it seemed like a good use of technology, and how comfortable were they with it from a civil liberties perspective.

I got the impression that the ladies he was interviewing were pretty comfortable with the program, though I didn't hear their answers to the other questions.

Guess I'll have to tune in to KOMO!

– Abigail

Update: And here's the view facing the other direction on the dock (actually taken from the ferry before it took off).

Update 2: Can't find any info online about this purported license plate program; wonder when details will surface? Maybe it's not a done deal, but still.

Press mention

Security Director News, July 2008:

Profitability

From the beginning Airship has been pushing for more transparent pricing and better customer value within the physical security industry. Not only do we believe in it, but it's inevitable. As IT continues to converge with physical security, digital video hardware is seeing increased commoditization. Water flows both ways though: IT guys are jumping into the physical security industry precisely because it's not commoditized yet, and the margins remain fatter. This from SDM:

Some industry participants maintain that IT has become more commodity-based and less profitable in recent years. They see the security industry as a ripe area for expansion, much as some security dealers and systems integrators have been moving into home control and audio/video in recent years for the same reason.

“Quite honestly, what these products represent to them is higher margins than they can make in the networking world,” stresses Tony Sorrentino, vice president of merchandising for distributor ScanSource Security, Greenville, S.C., about IT integrators. “I think as competition continues to increase from networking servers and products, the world of physical security is becoming even more attractive to them.”

- Abigail

There is such a thing as a free lunch

John Honovich is a frequent and effective consumer advocate in the world of surveillance video. He has written a book which is free and frequently updated with reader contributions. Download it here.

A typical review:

An excellent professional decision and action from a non-selfish professional in the field. There should be many more like you out there since we all know something that someone does not know and needs to know. "A man is not wise for what he knows, but for what he knows that he does not know"

Thank you very much

Lt. Col. William Carvajal, PA, CPP, PSP, CSC

- Abigail

Airship wuz here

This just in from Gryph, at a field visit ripping out the old VCRs at last.

Feelz gooood.

- Abigail

There are some things surveillance video can and can't do, and we need to talk about them

Nobody involved in CCTV should miss this good piece (IP Video Market Info) about the civic surveillance. We need to use public surveillance video to keep people safer in many of the same ways we use retail surveillance video for business intelligence. Collect, analyze, adapt behavior.

- Abigail

Sound analytics

[This has been cross-posted at Security Director News's Industry View]

The June 23 New Yorker has an interesting article (not available online) about efforts to make computers understand people and attain emotional intelligence. These efforts have been ongoing for decades, and challenges like regional speech patterns remain.

A company called Sound Intelligence founded in 2000 to focus on speech-noise separation also did analysis of non-speech sounds. By 2003 they had were working with the Dutch railway authority to detect glass-breaking, graffiti-spraying, and aggressive-speech sounds.

The Dutch city of Groningen now has an aggression detector installed at a busy intersection in an area full of pubs.

Elevated microphones spaced thirty meters apart run along both sides of the street, joining an existing network of cameras. These connect to a computer at at the police station in Groningen. If the system hears certain sound patterns that correspond with aggression, it sends an alert to the police station, where the police can assess the situation by examining closed-circuit monitors: if necessary, officers are dispatched to the scene...The system is promising because it does not pretend to be more intelligent than it is. I thought the problem with the technology would be false positives — too many loud noises that the machine mistook for aggression. But in Groningen at least, the problem has been just the opposite. "Groningen is the safest city in Holland," [one of the systems designers] said, ruefully. "There is virtuslly no crime. We don't have enough crime to train the system properly."

The system is also installed in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Coventry, and is being tested in London and Manchester.

- Abigail